After life

Funerals are so inherently morbid; depressing. Yesterday my wife buried her father. There was not much of a father daughter relationship but the absence of that relationship does not void the action, process or state of grief. I have never lost; physically anyway, anyone close to me, therefore I can't fully understand this pain.

Why do people wear black at funerals? Black is always less vibrant and more depressingly morose at funerals. Of what little I knew about his life I am left to wonder; did he die on 10 February or was he dead a long time ago? Was his lifestyle a desperate plea for his creator to hasten the inevitable, or was it a distraction from life itself?

At funerals they always talk about the celebration of the persons life; but I can not recall ever attending a funeral and seeing a celebration of life. If that's what passes for a celebration of life then the gift of life was truly wasted on a number of us, or those left behind are to stricken by grief to be lucid enough to appreciate the meaning of the word celebrate.

The ceremony is always melancholic, the hymns somber, weather almost always brooding; perhaps fitting for the occasion. Must it be so? What if we never went to a church (not in life or death); what if we decided to celebrate the persons life in the same manner the person lived their life.

Would that person be less welcomed in the kingdom of god (assuming that you believe in a place of golden streets, milk and honey and eternal life being in a seemingly drug induced state of euphoria, or an eternal life of having a hot pitch fork stuck in your ass). Must we even in the after life put on a show for god, must we persist with being sheep? If god is as omnipresent and omnipotent as we have been made to believe, then he would know we trying to bluff him; no. So why the farce? Why not just live and enter the after life on your terms, if you believe in the after life then you have an eternity to enjoy or regret the decisions you made when you were alive; but forever is not a life (or living), it's an existence.