Sweet Lady

Photo Credit: Livingbreadradio.com

What really matters in life?

This was the question I asked myself recently while attending a Funeral Mass in honour of a lady who suddenly passed on at the young age of fifty five.

The solemnity of the Mass was breathtaking and I still cannot find a word to describe the atmosphere. A stranger to the event like me would immediately know that lying in the casket right there before the altar was a woman who lived well. I later learnt that this particular lady dedicated her whole life to serving God, no husband and no children. Nothing else mattered to her; she found God, she found the Catholic Faith and that was it, it was a Treasure worth keeping and there was no looking back. 

The turn-out of people at the Funeral Mass was incredible and for someone whose only families were her immediate family and church family I pondered all the more on what really mattered in life.

Marriage? Children? Education? Career? Which is the most important? Nothing really matters but how well we live and where we spend eternity.

This lady though she left a mother and some siblings hurting, she saved a man from being a widower and one child or more children from being motherless. She was surrounded by love in her final moments and I am sure she would have been so proud of her spiritual family who gave her a befitting send forth to meet her maker.

The hymns were carefully selected and the choir was a tiny winy glimpse of what the Angelic Choir of Heaven would be like. The undertakers were obviously warned to maintain decorum as they carried her body and so there was no fancy back and forth dancing.

I wonder how my own funeral will be; I really do pray it will be when I am very old and that my boys and their wives will know exactly what to do to make the ceremony beautiful. I also pray that at least one of them will be the chief celebrant as a priest of course but so far they all like girls and it will take divine intervention for this prayer to come to fruition. A senior friend of mine has written in her will how she wants her funeral to be, down to the hymns to be sung on that day. It definitely takes a lot of nerves to do such.

I also heard of a woman above seventy who planned her own funeral; she made a dress to be buried in which she showed to all her children and sons in law. She paid for a burial space at the cemetery and every other thing that needed to be paid for. She also requested that only family members would attend the ceremony which had to be within a certain time frame.

At the same funeral of this lady whose name was Bisi, I heard a lot of positive comments and all the people whose spiritual lives were enriched by her. I didn’t know who she was but had to be there because of her mother who is a very dear friend of mine. I wanted to know about her and I asked a friend who knew her quite well to describe her to me which she did in one sentence; Bisi was a SWEET lady, sweet being the key word.

Tonight think of a word which you will want to be described with and then live it to the latter. At the end of life, nothing else will matter but the way one is remembered.