Excerpt: Faraway, Anyway

He smiled and made his way back into the pew of the church and sat Mary down next to him. In a way, he observed, funerals were a beautiful thing, the constant moving, constant agitation and sounds from the living competing with the silence, stillness and stone like beauty of the dead. No one ever though of the living at a funeral or in a cemetery. Though they were made to commemorate the people that have passed on these places are to comfort and display the artwork of the living. The dead people wouldn’t really want to be put in a box and stuffed six feet underground (though I don’t think they would appreciate being burned up or frozen either) but the living think that they would and want to be able to come back and remember them. In a way it was a way to keep them from really leaving. He really didn’t want the dead to leave because soon they would be forgotten and no one would ever want to be forgotten and left at the wayside. And he would never want to be left behind either.