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  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    Attending the funeral of a family member every single year multiple times until I was about 18 … and then sporadically on a regular basis since then.

    I’m Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in a small community and from the time I was a baby, I attended a funeral of someone I knew at least once a year and usually two or three times a year until I left home.

    At first as a kid, it was weird … then as I grew older it was disturbing because every time I saw a dead body, I realized … some day that’s going to be me, my life will end and I’ll no longer be here. At about eight years of age, it was quite an existential crisis because it scared the shit out of me for about a year. After that, it became terrible to attend funerals, then sad, then felt like nothing … I could no longer feel sad, afraid or anything … I no longer really cared and became apathetic to it all.

    I now accept death … I hate it, I don’t like it but I accept it but it took seeing a lot of dead bodies for me to get to this point.

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      I haven’t been to as many funerals as you have, but several course family members have died.

      I hate funerals.

      The best funeral I’ve ever been to wasn’t a funeral. Instead, the family got together at the daughter’s house and just visited for a few days. Then next spring, on what would have been their birthday, everyone gathered to memorialize them, and spread their ashes.

      That was a much nicer way of handling it, in my opinion.