C-CAD4-031
Barista: Kyle Alder
Date: Dec-31-2019
Receipt: C-CAD4-031
Subject: Business as Usual
I’ve been to a lot of funerals. Too many. And every single one of them left me feeling hollow.
Not because I didn’t care. Not even because of grief. Just because they never felt real. Rehearsed words. Stifled emotions. So-called “celebrations of life” that felt more like empty rituals paying tribute to some messiah no one had ever met, promising our lost ones were in a “better place.” Except—not all of them. Not all of us. Not unless we followed the script, memorized the right lines, lived the right way, according to them. And they don’t even agree on the rules.
I remember sitting there, in stiff clothes that didn’t fit right, listening to strangers talk about people they never really knew. Preachers and priests who’d never shared a meal with the dead, never laughed with them, never fought with them, never lived alongside them. And yet, they had the audacity to decide where their souls had gone. The arrogance of it. The certainty. The cold, polished finality of a fate decided by someone else.
And I hated it. I hated all of it.
That’s not what today is. That’s not what it has to be. …I hope.
If we’re doing this—if we’re really saying goodbye—it has to mean something. It needs to be real. No hollow prayers. No promises of salvation. Just us. We need to remember them as they were. Not as saints, not as spirits in some better world, but as people. Messy, complicated, wonderful people.
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So today, I make a choice. I choose to believe that truly remembering them is enough. That whatever’s left of them—wherever they are—still matters. I choose to believe that we don’t need a savior to make this moment sacred.
We can make it sacred ourselves.
And for the first time, maybe a funeral won’t feel like a funeral. Maybe it’ll feel like something real.
Decaffeinate Receipt
“Cat killer.”
Botanical Trivia | 1 Word