Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.
Interpretation
Funerals can serve as a reminder of life's transience, prompting us to make the most of the time we have.
In this quote, Regina Brett reflects on the duality of funerals as both sorrowful and comforting events. While many may dread them, she sees them as opportunities to pause and reflect on life's finitude, urging us to invest in the quality of our lives during the time we have, represented metaphorically by the 'dash' on a tombstone that signifies the span of life between birth and death.
In practice
A eulogy at a memorial service can include this quote to encourage attendees to reflect on their own lives.
When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
Greet every morning with open arms and say thanks every night with a full heart. Each day is a precious gift to be savored and used, not left unopened and hoarded for a future that may never come.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn't about keeping time. It's about stopping it.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
Cancer is messy and scary. You throw everything at it, but don't forget to throw love at it. It turns out that might be the best weapon of all.
My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
If gratitude, when exerted towards another, naturally produces a very pleasing sensation in the mind of a grateful man, it exalts the soul into rapture when it is employed on this great object of gratitude to the beneficent Being who has given us everything we already possess, and from whom we expect everything we yet hope for.
It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
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