The Funeral

Once there was a little girl who was not afraid of death. Then she went to a funeral.
She had been to funerals before. Even stared down into the closed eyes of those shells left behind with an almost morbid yet numb disconnect. She watched the mourners and only cried a tear or two empathizing with the pain of those who hurt because they lost another.
But then came this funeral. The funeral of a woman who once held her hand when she was only a little girl. She sat in the back row as countless others who had also been touched by this woman stood and told stories of the life lived before the crowd. The girl, now much older then when the woman had first held her hand, could not stop thinking. First were the memories they had shared, memories she was too cowardly to confess in front of all the watery eyes. The girl remembered how the woman would teach her to make paper-bag puppets and hand her Hansen's Mandarin sodas on hot, sunny days. She remembered that she once was a little girl, a time that now seemed so far away.

Then a speaker addressed the crowd and said this:
"What we say, what we do, and who we are will affect people in ways we will never know, like our shadow that stretches past ourselves and goes places we may actually never go."

The girl couldn't stop thinking about her own shadow, where it was stretching and if it was even there at all. The girl wondered if her friends would sing at her funeral...if she would be so fondly remembered. The girl did not go to the opened casket to see the empty shell and instead chose to remember the woman good and standing tall, laughing in unison with her child-self as they both made paper-bag puppets. The girl couldn't stop crying, even after she returned home, wondering about her own life and what she would leave behind. And for the first time, the girl truly understood the value a death gives to life.