Limited Time and the Unspoken Truths

Is Gen X running out of time? Do we need to speak the unspoken while there is still time? Yes.

Last night I participated in a memorial for the dearest of friends. Her name was Erika and I wrote about her in a poignant article in the early days of Gen X Watch. In “Healing Hearts and Being the Difference” I wrote about Erika’s amazing influence on me in a time where I needed a person like her in my life more than ever. Our meeting was a critical moment that changed my life for the better.

Losing her inspired me to get off my ass and start Gen X Watch. Our Fem Fridays are dedicated to her and will always honor her.

I did not expect to be an officiant at the memorial, but when I was asked to fill the role I could not refuse.

As a former minister I have been to far more funerals than I have been to weddings. In all my years in that role I have never seen a funeral home match the beauty and attention to detail of honoring a lost loved one than Erika’s family did in this in home memorial. It was truly honoring someone who was beloved by so many taken from us too soon.

After a presentation from the family it was my time to speak. Surrounded by friends I have known since 1985, I came to the front of the room and spoke. I introduced it with a few brief words and a poem by Emily Dickenson about eternity being a series of moments and then transitioned it to everyone in the room.

I made it clear that I am not qualified to eulogize Erika on my own, but together, we are. Then encouragement was given to whomever wanted to speak the opportunity to tell us their stories. It is in the stories of our moments that Erika will live eternally as we live out the life lessons she taught us.

One by one for the next hour people came up and spoke their stories. Each one was as poignant, if not more so, than the stories I wrote about in my article about her. Stories of Erika holding space for us, loving us in our darkest moments, and being the very hub of love that we all needed more than we knew.

These were the most remarkable stories told of one woman in one hour.

Her younger brother took to the floor and spoke his truth, his grief, and his gratitude to everyone there through barely controlled tears.

This was the closing story. It had to be. So I ended things with my first conversation and last conversation with Erika and a reminder of all that we heard today and the importance for us to live out these life lessons for each other and all of those we encounter.

But in this, there was a thought that I could not escape that has often haunted me in the funerals of beloved and impactful people like Erika.

The unsaid truths that time leaves forever unspoken.

There are many things those of us of the Gen X generation have in common. Most of us have a dark truth. We have more days in this life behind us than we do ahead of us. The ones born at the tail end have not hit that mark yet, but they will soon.

Time is precious and there is a limited time for us. And at funerals people say so many beautiful and important things about the lost loved one. And as I hear the stories I have to wonder, did the beloved lost one know this? Did we say it?

So often I hear family members and loved ones in grief say, “I wish I had told them how much they meant to me more often. There were so many wasted moments I did not say the unsaid because I thought it goes without saying.”

I wish that he had living memorials where we sat in a room with the person sitting in front as opposed to a casket or ashes and said all of the things at funerals while they are still alive. I want them to hear from us what they mean to us now before it is too late.

I’ve helped coordinate such an event for a journalism professor who was dying of cancer in 2010. It made him so happy to know the impact he had on his former students over the decades. But it took impending death and a diagnosis to spur the event because we all knew that time was limited.

Never assume words of gratitude, love and appreciation goes without saying. The world itself is at the brink of destruction. I do not know which travesty will bring us to the stroke of midnight on the Doomsday Clock. It will be the ecology or war and it may be in my lifetime. But that withstanding, in a moment any of us could pass on for any number of unexpected reasons. Now is the most precious gift we have.

Tell them they matter now in this moment. Eternity is a series of now.

Dedicated to Erika

Dedicated to my friend Erika!

Erika died on Christmas leaving behind a family that has immediate needs.

Click here to read the story of how Erika saved my life when we were teenagers.

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