The Healing Journey

July 26, 2026

So much has changed. Families no longer have two days of calling hours, some not even one. And more often, we get news of a death through social media and the internet. Sadly, some families don’t even bother to share the news.

More than once, I’ve missed the death of an acquaintance because no one called or placed an obituary. In other cases, there was no wake or funeral, probably because public mourning isn’t a priority with the younger generations. But grieving is necessary part of life, and an extremely important part as you get older and lose the ones you love.

When I was a kid, every Sunday after church, we observed a family ritual of driving to the cemetery to visit our grandparents and relatives so we could “pay our respects.” My job was to carry the watering pail as we tidied up their graves and said a few prayers for the repose of their souls. For the most part, those traditions are gone.

However, in recent years, I’ve developed another habit. I always filled in dates for birthdays and doctor appointments on my cellphone calendar, but now I’ve begun to include the dates when people died because I want to remember them and say a prayer or two … and hope they put in a good word for me upstairs.

My calendar is getting filled with these reminders. For example, my mother and my best friend Norman passed on the same day, July 26. My father died on Christmas Eve, and at least four other family members and in-laws died Christmas week, which was extremely traumatic at the time, but as a young minister told my sister when our father passed, “What a wonderful gift to spend Christmas in heaven.” At the time, I wasn’t so sure.

I also want to remind myself to reach out to the surviving family members with some words of consolation. I suppose it’s just my own feeble attempt to “pay my respects.”
©J Pisani

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