The thing they never tell you is how much of a funeral is just chairs. Folding chairs, set up in careful rows on somebody's carpet or a rented room's floor, and everyone sits in them like they've been assigned seats they didn't ask for. There is a table with photographs. There is coffee that nobody finishes. There is a box or an urn holding what's left of a person who, a week ago, could laugh at a joke.
I keep thinking about the numbers, because numbers are what I know. A human body is mostly water, and water came here on rocks, and the whole breathable layer of air that kept that body going is thinner than the shell of an egg wrapped around the planet. That's not poetry.
I've seen the edge of it, a bright blue line no thicker than a fingernail held at arm's length, and everything any of us has ever loved lives inside that line.
So I watch the woman in the front row press a folded tissue against her mouth to keep quiet, and I understand that I am looking at one of the rarest things in the observable universe: a warm creature grieving another warm creature, on the only rock we've ever found where that's possible.
From up there you cannot see a single border. You cannot see the graves. You cannot see who was loved and who was left. It all resolves back into that one thin blue line, and the line does not know we are down here having a funeral.
But we are. That's the part I bring back down with me.
Someone is always, right now, sitting in a folding chair, refusing to let that warmth go quietly.