JIM HENDRICKS: The way we see each other

Kind of sad, the way we see each other these days.

Not the political view, the one where you look through a red or blue lens and applaud or condemn whoever’s looking back at you, depending on whether they’re using the same color lens.

No, just the way we see one another, which is not often enough overall, and, when it does happen, too often under sad circumstances.

That was the case Tuesday. I’d been asked to perform a task that has come up frequently over the years, and, it seems, more frequently in these later years. Pallbearer. There would be six of us, and we’d be carrying a casket from the church to the hearse and then from the hearse to the cemetery plot, the final resting place.

The casket I would be helping carry would be that of my last aunt, Alise, who died last weekend.

My first memory of seeing a funeral was when I was around 5, right after we lost my Uncle Kent Jones, at age 42, the first of that generation of my family to leave us. He was Mama’s brother, and I remember her crying and I tried to make her feel better.

“It’ll be all right,” I said, repeating something I’d heard other grownups say that day. I was hoping they were right.

“No, it won’t,” Mama said. She said it wouldn’t be all right for a very long time. And it wasn’t. Life got back to normal with work for the adults and school for the kids, but it wasn’t all right. Not really.

They say funerals in the South are different, but I can’t say. I’ve never been to one outside the South and, in all honesty, I avoid them whenever possible, along with weddings. My old standing line is there’s not much difference between a funeral and a wedding. In both cases, there are a lot of flowers, you have to wear uncomfortable clothes and somebody’s life’s over.

In my defense, guys usually see the humor in that. Especially when they’re fidgeting with an uncomfortable necktie. That’s the best time to tell it.

As I drove to the church in Camilla, both of those things — Uncle Kent dying too young and my joke that, admittedly, very few women I’ve told it to have found find to be amusing — went through my head, along with the other times I’ve had to help carry someone — especially a relative — those last few dozen yards.

It was mentioned at the service that Aunt Alise wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be sad and, truthfully, I caught myself at hers, as I have others, looking down at the floor and cracking a smile, recalling some funny incident or another that happened over the years. Precious memories, being what they are, come when they will.

A funeral isn’t for the person who’s passed, but for those who are left behind, singing about when we all get to heaven.

The hope for forever is a reminder of just how temporary life is. On the drive through Newton to the cemetery, I passed by the old courthouse, still standing, and all the used-to places. The store my grandparents used to run. The post office where I used to have to get them to give me our mail because I could never get the box combination right. The barber shop where I used to get my hair cut. The gas station where I used to work as a teenager. The restaurant where I used to hang out with my buddies. The police station where I used to work on weekends during college.

What time didn’t knock down, the Flood of ‘94 did.

Later at the cemetery, standing in our family plot as the minister said the final words at graveside, I was reading off the names. I stood by Mama and Daddy’s graves, wondering how it could have been that long. All the folks who shaped my life were in that plot. “I’m standing in the middle of my childhood,” I mentioned to my cousin Bucky Jones, Kent’s son, who also was a pallbearer. He nodded.

It’d been a long while since I’d seen Bucky. In fact, I ran into a good many folks — and kinfolks — I hadn’t seen in a long while, some since school. This is when everyone talks about how sad it is that people don’t get together anymore except at things like funerals, and there are declarations of remedying that. More often than not, it turns out the road to the graveyard may, in fact, actually be the one that’s paved with good intentions.

Time that’s passed and how you spent it matter, but maybe not as much as the time you have left and how you spend it. There’s always room for another memory.

Email Jim Hendricks at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_JHendricks on Twitter.