Frankly Put: Hosting a Funeral For Self
A single rose on a tombstone, black umbrellas and overcast skies. At your funeral, do you ever think about who the six people who will be tasked to carry you to your final resting place would be?
In this case, there aren’t six pallbearers. No one tells you the number of times you will be the only one standing over your own grave. How do you put yourself in the coffin, carry yourself to the grave, throw dirt and host your own funeral? How do you grieve? What do you do with the sadness of leaving yourself in the ground?
I have been thinking about how many times, metaphorically, we die. We are so quick to teach ourselves how to kill the parts of us that we don’t like but we aren’t so keen to honour the dead and grieve them. How do we hold our own funerals to bid goodbye to the people we used to be? What do we write on our headstones so when we come back to visit it isn’t out of shame?
Our growth can sometimes be incomplete in that sense. We must admit that we carry the wounds from the twist and turns that life puts us through and honestly, we never heal well. We sometimes took explosions and coated our scars over shrapnel still embedded in our flesh. We limp but tell ourselves, it is just a new way of walking. Our bodies ache and we call it growing pains.
Self-work sometimes looks like having to take yourself into the operating room and being the one to dig out that shrapnel that others outside ourselves couldn’t see. It’s messy and sometimes unsanitary but it must be done. You must, on the job learn to stitch yourself back together and stop the bleeding… “so you don’t bleed on those who didn’t cut you.”
Alternatively, it could just remain lodged in you and you go about your day without further thought. One day, the old wounds flare up. Unfortunately, it is an occurrence that anyone who has spun around the sun enough times could tell you. Aches and failed healing sometimes lay dormant and wake up at the most inconvenient times and if the time is not made for them, they will make their own space in your time.
I see growth in two ways. The first is that it can be seen as shedding. Every so often we grow within the bounds of whatever skin we created out of our experiences and the people we have around us. It gets to a point where it no longer serves us and we must then shed it off and grow another layer of skin over ourselves.
The problem I have with that view is that fundamentally we remain the same people, it is only the outer layer of us that grows and even then we leave that layer of us in the dust of our pursuit of happiness and life beyond ourselves. It is a bit flawed in that we incubate the parts of us that never really change and the things that could have a positive impact sometimes remain skin deep.
The second, which I have come to see in a greater light, is that we are sculptors. Before every life milestone, we are working on building ourselves from the ground up, infusing experience, lessons and new traits into the new version of us and when the time comes, we breathe our life into it and leave behind the old version of us like a husk. This is the part of us that we bury.
In my experience, when we fail to bury that version of us, people with whom we lose touch with as that version of us, only see that version of us when we have “upgraded” to a new us. While I don’t advocate for carrying your image in everyone’s mind with you everywhere and tasking yourself to change it while you do, I think it helps to avoid any bitter unearthing of that old version.
It’s crazy to think back and realise that it may be what makes transitions so hard. I was so busy stretching myself in both directions, where I am holding on to the old version of me but also yearning to make myself fit into the new space I am transitioning into it. Maybe this is why birthdays can sometimes be jarring to experience.
As a man, the common trend is that we move about our birthdays like a regular day but I think subconsciously we know that when that day ends, it’s in our heads marinating in the fact that yet again we have to write a report to self on the changes that have happened. The shaking realization that there are demands to be met every year is one that is met on those days.
You don’t have to explain to people why you bought yourself a single rose but do so. You don’t have to explain why you are dressed in black on those days. You don’t have to explain that when you are silent through those times, it is that you are doing all these things metaphorically. You don’t have to explain why you set aside space for your grief of self in your self-care but do so.
To be able to sit with yourself and actually, without distractions, meet yourself where you are is vital to the holistic experience of life. Do not turn yourself into Sisyphus and keep trying to roll this boulder up the hill every time life demands you to grow out of yourself. Change comes so why fight its inevitability? I like to think that it makes me adaptable to be able to allow change to embrace me fully.
I’ve never been a fan of funerals or change, but perhaps I can learn to tolerate them a little better while I create space for the grief when I host these funerals for self, to put it Frankly.
