ameba

If there was a word for the last weekend (Sana viikonvaihteeksi) It would have to be fragile.

We attended the funeral of my girlfriend's grandmother. Being in a traditional Greek Orthodox funeral was a new experience for me. I think it is appropriate to explain some terms and traditions to those, who are new to the concept. In Greek Orthodox church it is traditional to hold services called panihida for those, who have passed on. This is usually done once a year. The panihida is a requiem, or a soul mass, where people pray that the souls of their relatives, parted from this world, would find their way to peace and eternal rest and bliss. The Orthodox funeral is basically the same, but the departed is participating in the service, as he/she is laid in an open coffin in the church and priests sing their prayers and people pay their last respects by the side of the coffin.

I have never actually seen a dead person before. I've attended many funerals, but all with a closed coffin. The fact that you see the deceased makes it all more concrete, more absolute than just looking at the surface of pleated silk or polished wood of the coffin. You can feel the death's presence on a gut level. Seeing an old woman, years wasted away in a hospital bed, makes you think. Her crooked hands, her whoole body, seemed brittle, as if all the essence in it had been drained away, so light and spidery.. in a word, fragile.

The human mind is also fragile. The relatives try to compose themselves and stoically stand in reverence, and then at the time of final good-bye, those fragile defences collapse, as the tears will themselves out. You can see how shattered the person is inside despite the calm outer image he/she is trying to project. It makes you appreciate what sanity you have left yourself. Later, people are bickering and blaming each other for not having made the arrangements properly, or whatever reason, in futile attempts to vent their own discomfort.

I don't fear death as such, but I dislike funerals. Tragedies tend to bring out the worst in people and funerals are often very fatiguing, both mentally and physically, even if you are not a close relative to the deceased yourself.

We also paid a visit to a friend of ours in hospital. A younger brother of another friend. He had been on his way home on Wednesday night, when he had slipped on the very doorstep of the building he lives in. The building is old, and has beautiful old oak-framed doors with small glass panels in between. The granite stairs in front of the door were icy and slippery and he lost his foothold and fell forward, through the door. Or, more precisely, through one or two of the glass windows. He managed to raise his arms to protect his face, and sustained several deep cuts and severed the arteries in both of his arms. He also damaged the elbow nerve of his left arm and cut seven of his finger tendons. All by one shard of glass to the wrist. Luckily he managed to ring some of the doorbells and get some elderly woman to open her door and call an ambulance. He was operated for five hours and was doing quite well on Saturday despite all. The human body truly is fragile. The boy is only 14 years old, and could easily have died, if he hadn't had help so quickly. He lost something like one liter of blood. (That's one quarter of a gallon for you not familiar with the metric system) That's over a fifth of what he has. I'm really glad he survived.

So, this weekend has been a thought-raiser. Thoughts of how fragile all things are, and how fortunate I am, considering. They say time will heal all wounds, but the process is long and painful. It's true for all wounds, both physical and otherwise.

I hope my next update will be of happier things.