When you’re seventeen, you don’t think about your best friend’s dad dying. When you’re seventeen, you don’t think about attending the funeral of your first boss. You don’t wonder whether the guy who owns the mountain where you ride horses is gonna die of cancer. When you’re seventeen, all you’re concerned with is boys, hair, and if you’ve got enough gas to run to Wendy’s. You worry about how you look in your swimsuit, and who is going to prom with whom. When you’re seventeen, you’re self involved with your own problems…and too young to realize they’re not problems at all, because they have zero bearing on the rest of your life.

But when you’re forty-one, you smile through tears as your best friend delivers her father’s eulogy. You remember the times spent with him as he patiently taught the two of you how to drive in their subdivision. The silver van with the emergency brake lever in the console. You think about how many times he drove you to Walmart because there was nothing else to do…sometimes twice in one day! You recall him helping move furniture and building bookshelves and baking cheesecakes. You realize how much he loved his daughter and how he impacted your life, too.

When you’re forty-one, you dress in black on a dreary Saturday and drive to a nearby church to pay your respects to the first woman who ever took a chance on you. You remember her saying she hired you because you were the only candidate to wear pantyhose to the interview. You wear pantyhose now. Not only because it’s proper, but because it’s Sue. You worked with her son at a job later in life, and you’ve kept in touch all these years later thanks to Facebook. The death touches you more than you would have believed. Especially more than you would have believed at seventeen.

When you’re forty-one, looking back on a man who offered you a cold beer from his wooden porch on a humid summer day, who told you which trails were best for your high-headed Saddlebred, who laughed as you bet against Tom Brady EVERY TIME, who is now laying in his hospital bed, just waiting….

To be seventeen again. When you think heartache is a guy asking another girl to dance. When your day is ruined because you can’t stay the night with your best friend. When you got a B minus on your Chemistry test and you know you’ll be grounded from the phone and the movies this weekend. When you have no idea what it feels like to attend three funerals in seven days. Back before you watched a man you care about tear up as he tells you about his last words to his cousin. Decades before you see your best friend get up to fix her dad a plate then suddenly remember he’s not there and sit back down. Prior to watching your friend in a black suit, standing beside his mother’s casket, with his arm around his daddy. That’s how you get wrinkles, and grey hairs, and why you treasure life.

Yes, I attend many funerals. I don’t know how to avoid them unless people stop dying or I stop loving. Sometimes I go for the ones I’ve lost, sometimes I go for the ones that remain. It’s all about the same thing: to show respect and to let them know they made an impact on me in some form or fashion. It hurts. It’s sometimes awkward. But I’ve never regretted showing up. I don’t say I love you enough and I never answer the phone. But if I have attended a funeral, there was love in my heart. And I am so sorry you’re grieving the loss of your loved one. My prayers are with you. It’s a beautiful, messy life, isn’t it? Better to be an angel. I hope my wings are silver, I can’t ever keep white clean.