The Moments After The Funeral

Jordan Carter | January 28, 2026

For a twenty-four-year-old, I have experienced a lot of death and I have been to a lot of funerals. I remember the day very clearly. The day I really learned what death meant. I was only five years old. It was early, on a Thursday morning in July, when I crawled into my parent’s bed, and they told me that they had some news for me. As sensitively as they could, they explained that my aunt, someone who I was close with and loved very much, had passed away. I remember my mom holding me as I cried, and my dad telling me that it would all be okay because she was in heaven with Jesus. And I remember my broken little heart just waiting for the feelings to go away, thinking that it would never get better.

I was depressed for the next several weeks, and constantly found myself looking at photos of her and dealing with my emotions the best way I knew how to as a child. At her funeral, everyone wore my aunt’s favorite color, pink, per her request. We sang her favorite worship songs and shared beautiful memories of her. And this was the first time I truly understood the meaning of death.

Both sides of my family are huge, and as I grew up, I attended many funerals. I have experienced the passing of both the young and the old. Great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and even babies. I found myself better able to cope with the deaths of family members who were in their old age. You could say I was sort of expecting it, if that doesn’t sound too morbid. It was not nearly as simple as processing the feelings that occur when a cousin, a young one with a lot of life left to live, is killed in a motorcycle accident.

Processing death is not an easy thing to do for anyone, but in the many funerals I have attended, I have learned a few things that have helped me cope with the inevitable. The first being, to live life to the fullest. Original, I know, but hear me out. The knowledge that life on earth is finite has made me realize that I should cherish every moment and just live, not recklessly of course but I do my best to love my family and friends as if I could lose them tomorrow. I strive to live every moment for the Lord but also for myself. I do things that make me happy and try not to care too much about what other people think or sweat the small stuff or the things out of my control. Being anxious or stressed out about things isn’t adding anything to my life so I do my best to give that to God as He tells us to cast our cares on Him, as well as to not be anxious because He is with us. Life is fleeting and I don’t want to live for ninety-something years and regret not doing something because I was scared or spend my last moments wishing that I had made a different choice somewhere along the line. I know, it all sounds very cliché, but the second thing that I have learned does not sound quite as familiar to some.

Oddly enough, I have learned to enjoy funerals, to an extent. My mom has always called these dreaded events ‘Celebrations of Life’. And for a very long time, I could never look at it that way. I mean, how could I? Someone I cared about was gone, and it hurt. I think the day I realized what she meant was when I was fifteen, and it was all due to one particular family tradition.

It was a sweltering September day in Oakland, California. It was my great-aunt’s funeral, and my entire family was seated in the pews of the Catholic church that she had attended for nearly twenty years. The air conditioning was broken, it was over one-hundred degrees outside and all of us were miserable. I remember it being a beautiful service but a rough one to get through. After the burial, our entire family went back to her home, where we all fellowshipped and shared a meal. This is the tradition that changed my thinking. You see, most of my family is spread out all across the state of California and there are some members in completely different parts of the country, so a lot of us don’t get to see each other all that often.

I put a pattern together that day. After almost every single funeral that I had ever been to, my family would be together. It was like a reunion. We would make the most of the less-than-ideal situation and spend time with loved ones that we wouldn’t get to see very often otherwise. The sorrow almost seemed to melt away for those few hours as we enjoyed each other’s company and felt our feelings together. I began to realize that death, no matter how much it hurts, can bring family together and I appreciated that.

In a strange way, I almost look forward to a funeral when it happens. Not only as a way of closure and peace but also as a simple, good reunion with family and friends. Losing the people you love is awful, but unfortunately, it’s a part of life. If you’re lucky, you get some pretty great people to do life with who will support you in the tough times and who you will be truly sad to lose.

So no, I don’t enjoy funerals, but I do enjoy the moments after them, because those hold some of my best, most cherished memories. And those memories and those people remind me why life is worth living in the first place and that I should cherish every minute of it.