What Funerals Taught Me About Weddings

Last week I walked into the church and set up the AV for a memorial. Then that afternoon I sat with a bride and groom as we planned their engadgment shoot. So, you know, a normal day off.

As most of you know, I worked as a musician in the wedding industry for about eight years. 250 weddiings total, I'm told. That was quite a journey for me: I loved weddings, then got super cynical about weddings, then finally matured enough to see their metaphoric beauty, to now being old enough to love weddings again.

The Presbyterians don’t do many weddings. Funerals are our things, around 25 services a year. Part of that is because our congregation has a lot of legacy (it's been around for 40 years and many of those founding members are still with us. I'm having breakfast with one of them on Monday), but the other reason is that we don't charge for them.

Anyone who calls and asks for a funeral will get conencted with my friend, Phil (we went to seminary together and he's now an associate pastor). He works with the familiy to help them put a service together and eventually my phone buzzes with a group text asking about service times and availbility. I got one yesterday, we're looking at June 11th.

I've grown to like it. It is actually better to go to the house of moruning than the house of laughter. And it's nice to stand in the Church's 1,900 year tradition of caring for the dead.

But working all the funerals taught me something very important about weddings: it's okay to be sad.

Being Sad at a Wedding

My brother Josh and I and shared a room our entire lives. Then he went off to college for two years and with a girl he liked. They came for the summer to get married and it was weird. Having just fluked out of schoool, I was already feeling lost. But I didn't realize how lost I was about my brother. On a hot summer afternoon, I went for a long walk and suddnly, unexpectedly burst into uncontrollably sobs. Hot tears. Snot. A deep, ugly cry.

I was so disconnected from myself, it was almost an out-of-body experience. I had no idea why I was crying. Something hurt, and it hurt deep and I didn't know why. All I could do was shake with tears and ask myself over and over, "David, what’s wrong?”

I had no idea.

In hindsight, it’s because I was loosing my brother. I loved him. I loved the girl he was marrying. I was happy they were getting married. And I was sad.

I don't know why it was so different. I loved Brian's wedding (which still stands in my life histroy as last time I had an acoholic drink) and Michelle's weddings was a banger.

But then Liz got married, and I started to get sad. After her wedding, I somehow ended up by myself, getting home first. I walked into the quiet house. We'd played so many weddings, we sort of had a post-wedding routine: a trip to Taco Bell or Panda Express (hey, we were young) and then crashing in the family room. Liz often retreat to her room and watched DVDs of The West Wing. Being annoying little brothers, we'd sometimes just invite ourselves in and hang out, often trying valiantly to sit cross-legged on her palates ball.

But the night of her wedding, I walked into an empty house. The family room was empty. Her room was empty. Everything was empty. She wasn't there to eat crappy food and be annoyed. She wasn't there to watch The West Wing. The people I just liked being with weren’t there anymore. Instead, I stood in an empty house alone. And I was sad.

Thankfully, the next post-wedding experience wasn’t as sad. After Eric’s wedding, Justin and I took Grandma home. The house was still empty when we got there, but grandma was always a party and a seasoned matriarch (who had been divorced and twice widowed). So Justin and I, the two remaining bachelors of the family, sat in the kitchen with our widowed grandma and we talked relationships. I don't remember what she said, but I remember feeling peaceful. Like it was okay. Like not matter how the family changed, I would still have one, whatever it looked like.

Then Justin got married. By then, I'd moved away. Found a new life, a new school, a new job, a new community, a new church. My friendship with my siblings had naturally reconfigured around their spouses and their many, many children. After that wedding, we could just hang out again. But I think I knew from experience that the end of one relationship was the beginning of a new one. And I'd come to like the new ones. So I was hardly sad at all.

I'd found my place as the avuncular figure who helped one drunk groomsman get some decaf coffee, and stood by as another groom's man completly biffed his approach with one of the many single, attractive bride's maids. I could MC-ed the reception, I could look at my brother and his bride, and be well and truly happy for them. I was still sad about things. Not as the teenage and twenty-somethings friendgroup we had been, but as the adults we had grown into. The pain of losing something had healed into fond memories of having had something beautiful and now having something new. And getting in-lings out of it has been surpringly awesome. My siblings are idiots, but they all married crazy-well.

The point is, in those years of transition, nobody told me what I definitely needed to hear: it’s okay to be sad.

What Funerals Taught Me About Weddings

I’ve watched the same family with a hundred different faces walk into the church. We're all the same: grandpa, grandma, dad, mom, uncle, aunt, sibling. The chiding mom of five, the slack-jawed 17-year-old boy with all the hair and the button down that was ironed out of spite. The middle school girl awkwardly learning to walk in her new pair of heels. The tired, bearded dad trying to quiet a crying newborn. The wordless grandpa who sits in the narthex chairs waiting for wherever and whenever the family storm will take him next.

They're all, somehow, unqiely the same.

I've found, while the family at the funeral is the same as the family at the wedding, the funeral family is much kinder towards each other. They treat one other with such tenderness–even when it’s obvious they don’t like each other.

I think the difference between the funeral family and the wedding family is that the funeral family knows everyone is grieving. And in our deepest humanity, we’re willing to give each other a lot of slack. We can see the pain under the times when say things we don’t mean, do things we regret, and cry spontaneously.

But we don't do that at weddings.

At a wedding, everyone is supposed to be happy. This is a happy day! Everyone be happy, damnit!

But not all of us are, even if we are. Because I am human, I can be perfecly happy for a couple and be completly devistated at the same time. It's not contradiction, it's love. The kind of love you can only have in loss. But then the perfectly normal, natural grief (grief that expresses itself in ugly ways and inconvient times) can be interpreted as malace, sabotage, even hatred.

At a wedding, it's given a slammed door, a furious hang-up, a thrown phone, a scream. At a funeral, that behavior is given a hug and a cry.

I was hanging out with a young friend who’s family is heading towards a wedding season. I told him about my experiences and he confided, “I am sad; I just didn’t know it was okay.”

My firends, someone you love is getting married. That feels like a lot of change and loss. So it’s okay to be sad. It just means you love them.