The story in Breathing Lessons centers around a day trip to an old high school friend’s funeral. The couple taking the trip isn’t all that old, but the wife is having some major empty nest issues. That same weekend, she would be saying good-bye to her daughter, who was heading out for college. And driving out for her best friend’s husband’s funeral wasn’t making her feel any younger.

The older we get, the more we find ourselves attending funerals. Funerals for grandparents give way to funerals for parents, and when your spouses and friends start dropping, it just goes downhill from there. I’m at the age where it’s the parents who are going. Three friends at work lost their fathers this summer, including one of my best friends who flew home to China to be with her father in his final days.

Around the time I read Breathing Lessons, I was taking a road trip to a funeral myself. My husband’s uncle had passed, a year and a half after we watched my father-in-law die. I found myself singing again, standing in front of a church full of people who would truly miss Bob, standing in front of his wife and his daughter who thanked me with their eyes and their tears. I took a deep breath, and I sang, so much more for the breathing than for the dead.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under road tripping, sweetness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.