My first funeral

I was 16 years old before I ever had to deal with death. And it was so odd to me. I was crying even though I felt like I shouldn't. And oddly enough it wasn't because my dead grandpa was lying in an open casket looking more plastic and lifeless than I've ever seen anyone before. It's was because I realized then how much I take for granted; that life can be gone in an instant. That something that was once so familiar is suddenly so empty and that at this moment this weird and unpleasant feeling would become all so familiar in my life. Nothing will ever be like it was and there is always going to be an empty seat, one less voice in the room. And none of this had to do with my grandpa because I know where he is. It had to do with our family, how something was missing. 

As I look out at all of the other graves I think about the hundreds of people who have done this a hundred times. And how many of them watched one by one the absence of people around them grow as they walk down row by row. A list of love ones lost in my head is just one, but I wonder what that list will look like in a few years.