Funeral for a Friend

Once, long ago, my love and I attended a memorial service for an acquaintance of ours. It was like no other ceremony to which I have ever been. There was music and poetry and you knew that a man was gone, but the good things he had done lived on in the people in the room. Actually it wasn't a room but an outdoor dome fashioned from bricks where people sat on beautiful Persian carpets. The sunlight streamed into the dome from the places without bricks. When the people sang or recited Rumi, the sound was amplified. Many people filled that dome to honor a Persian man out in the desert who had been a poet and engineer and other things too. His wife was there. His son was there. It is easy to remember how lovely and sad that day was. My thoughts at that precise moment were somehow that service, that moment of death and peace, would never come again. I wanted to steal the memory so one day when I faced incredible grief, I would remember the feeling of death and peace together. In the future, I figured, no matter how bad I would feel, I'd envision that day, that service and I do.  I remember the instruments that the musicians played that afternoon. There was a drum that had little pieces of metal hanging from the rim which made a rhythmic drumming sound. I think it was called a tambor. Of course nobody tells us about love the way Rumi does. Love was there that day with Rumi seemingly in all things. The engineer was released from the earth with music and poetry. I hope that is the way people will celebrate my life one day. A moment like that is the magical culmination of every moment that came before it. Celebrating life is maybe all we can do or all we should do. We can share that together and we did. My love and I together will always be in that dome with love and music and Rumi forever. I can picture us with the enginer who built domes in the desert sitting on the carpets and reciting about love.