I was waiting on the wife of one of my regular customers today. She’s always super sweet, & I’m invariably glad to see her.

“Yankee,” I began, “her daddy was one of my regulars when I first started working down here. I didn’t know what to think of him. He used to say, ‘who’s your momma?’ All the time & tell me when I got married I was gonna hafta wash the skidmarks out of my husband’s drawers!”

Yankee’s eyes got rounder. Clearly, she wouldn’t have known how to take him, either.

I smiled at Miss Tammy, his daughter. “But I came to love him. He was a nice man.”

She nodded. “Daddy was. I remember too, you & another girl from down here came to his funeral.”

I paused.

I had forgotten about that. “Yeah, me & Skeeter came. It was probably the first funeral I attended on my own.” (Meaning, without my family) I recall Shanea & I talking ourselves into going. We felt that we needed to. “My husband says I go to more funerals than anybody he knows,” I told Tammy. “But he understands now that my customers are like my family… They’ve seen me grow up, in a way. I don’t necessarily like to go, but I need to.”

“No, I don’t like going, either, but it’s something you’ve got to do,” she agreed.

“I’ve tried explaining it to younger people-you might not go because you loved who died…you might be going because you love who’s left,” I added.

“That’s exactly right.”

So we parted, with tears & smiles.

I know I talk about death & funerals a lot on here, but it strikes a chord within me. It’s natural, and an act I grew up getting accustomed to. It’s never occurred to me to be scared of death, or afraid of the dead. You pay your respects & move on, & hope the spirit does the same 😊