Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.
Interpretation
Funerals can serve as a reminder of life's transience, prompting us to make the most of the time we have.
In this quote, Regina Brett reflects on the duality of funerals as both sorrowful and comforting events. While many may dread them, she sees them as opportunities to pause and reflect on life's finitude, urging us to invest in the quality of our lives during the time we have, represented metaphorically by the 'dash' on a tombstone that signifies the span of life between birth and death.
In practice
A eulogy at a memorial service can include this quote to encourage attendees to reflect on their own lives.
When you have cancer, it's like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn't want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second.
Greet every morning with open arms and say thanks every night with a full heart. Each day is a precious gift to be savored and used, not left unopened and hoarded for a future that may never come.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn't about keeping time. It's about stopping it.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
Cancer is messy and scary. You throw everything at it, but don't forget to throw love at it. It turns out that might be the best weapon of all.
My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day.
The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
One is always at home in one's past.
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