No Flannel Pants at My Funeral
Cute shoes but I wear them to all the funerals.
The winds took us to a funeral—an all-too-frequent errand now that we’re older. The older you get, the more you realize funerals aren’t really for the dead. They’re for the people left standing around afterward, holding flimsy paper programs and wondering what exactly to do with their hands.
I’ve come to understand the importance of simply showing up. Not for the speeches or the casseroles, but for your friends. When someone they love dies, it matters that you’re there. I didn’t always know that. There are a few funerals I skipped when I was younger, out of busyness or awkwardness or just not knowing better, and I regret that now. It turns out there’s no email you can send ten years later that reads, “Sorry I missed your grief.”
This particular funeral was for a friend of ours—a lawyer down on the South Carolina coast. He was kind and generous with his time, and not in the performative way some people are generous, where you know there’s a receipt being kept somewhere. He mentored Chad, made us laugh, and was married to a woman who could only be described as an absolute hoot. They were older than us, technically, but never acted it. I never once thought of them as “old.” They were just… alive. Curious. Willing to learn. The kinds of people who made aging look less like a slow decline and more like a particularly well-paced cocktail party.
That’s what I’d like to be when I grow up. But let’s be honest—getting older is mostly hard and frequently disappointing. You start to lose your keys, your stamina, and, on occasion, your dignity. If you’re lucky, you keep your sense of humor.
As we milled around the funeral home, surrounded by our mutual grief and strange comfort, we found ourselves watching a slideshow chronicling our friend’s life. Oddly, there were more pictures from his later years—yes, the years when flannel pants reigned supreme. I leaned over to Chad and muttered, “Don’t show pictures of me in flannel at the end of my run, and I promise not to post any of you.”
He nodded solemnly. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “Because I’m not planning to wear pants at all.”
And just like that, the grief cracked open, and we laughed. Not because death is funny, but because life—especially toward the end—really, really is.
