Life is not the point A to point B timeline drawn out on the plexiglass board in the autopsy room. Life is the feeling of touch brought on by a beating heart and a set of veins pumping warm blood. Death is not the end, but rather a different type of feeling. The dead are unreal, unmoving wax sculptures. Over-detailed and sickly pale. You touch them and, even if they have just passed, you can feel their numbness. Cold and unmoving, like a statue in a box. Their body lays in the coffin, eyes closed, resting in what passes as a ‘final rest”. Wearing the cheap grade F bullshit makeup of the funeral home, they sit emotionless and gone. The funeral home is nothing but a large, fake fantasy. Imagine blowing a Barbie house to size, everything too real and too perfect. Like a classic movie played over and over again, everything way too Brady-Bunched, crayon pictures held to the refrigerator by magnets. Long hallways and cheap-but-want-to-be-expensive furniture. The carpet always has that just cleaned smell, the walls all the same blah white. This is what passes as the passage way to your loved one's new eternal life. A hired man gets up and runs the ceremony, bullshitting his way through stories. Telling the dead body how much everyone in the room loved him. People holding and hugging. Kissing and comforting, if only life was this sweet all the time. What if it didn’t take death to bring this side of people out? Why is it that a month ago, the wife sitting on the front pew crying mascara down her wrinkled face was threatening to leave him? Before you know it the ceremony is over, people run to their cars to go home and drink. Telling each other they plan on going home to remember, but all their doing is pretending to forget. This is what passes as parting ways, final goodbyes and coming to terms with your lost "loved" one. Maybe if you finally drink enough you’ll forget that your loved one is gone, and then you’ll forget why you spent the whole day gasping words through thick tears. We want to forget we loved them, even, because if we remember we loved them, it hurts more. If we could just turn them into strangers on the news then maybe things would be easier. But we loved them, and that’s all that matters in the end. Not the lies about the perfect relationships, or even the stories of how the deceased saved you or brought you to God, it’s their love that helps you through it in the end. But love is bittersweet, because until we lose them, we never quite know what they mean to us in the first place.