A Smiling, Crying Alarm Clock

Bittersweet doesn't even begin to describe it.
Sister Margaret "Peg" Dolan, my friend Molly's grandmother, died about a week and a half ago, and the entire LMU community from the past 30 years, or so it seemed, came to her funeral. Sacred Heart Chapel was bloated with mourning, and love. She was a counselor, a professor, head of campus ministry, and the heart of the school...I am always happy to hear that, at an extremely male institution. On a personal level, I met her once. For a few seconds. She introduced herself while her Goddaughter and I were eating dinner. I was immediately struck by how I felt nothing could crush her spirit (she was going through chemotherapy at the time), and how, to her, I was the only person in the room--though Molly said the same thing.
Sister Peg was the fourth death in Molly's family in two months. That doesn't have the effect I want it to, in simple words. Try this; imagine your grandfather, lifelong dog, aunt, and Godmother, then imagine life suddenly deciding to go on without them. Then add senior year of college to the mix, and you've got one unfair emotional roller coaster. The worst part is, I know that this sort of thing is real life. Genocide in Sudan, Rwanda, Juarez...the Holocaust...Burma...the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. And more than that--death and suffering are items on the daily menu, for people right next door, not for the exotics or ancients miles away. Life trots along happily and then ringalingaling; the alarm clock called mortality interrupts your pleasant dream, and there is no snooze button.
I entered the murmuring Chapel a couple minutes before the funeral started, all of these dark clouds circling. I felt slightly panicked: everyone was already seated and watching me, a lone acquaintance of the superwoman, clicking along in rarely-worn black heels, all these dark clouds swarming. The panic didn't last long. I heard someone call me and turned to find Molly awaiting a hug. Despite the situation, I immediately felt better for it, and smiled as I watched her return to her reserved seat at the front of the Chapel. Next came David, a former LMU student now going through Jesuit training, who embraced me and said he'd pray for me. It was a funeral and I felt oddly loved; the dark clouds had melted away.
Chance had it (perhaps it wasn't chance at all) that I could see Molly's family from my seat in the back corner of the Chapel. I found myself watching them as they watched the casket and the proceedings, and I felt like a highly emotional fly on the wall, wanting nothing more than to fly to them. Afterwards, I crossed through a throng of well-wishers and hug-attacked Molly. We cried together for a long time. She cried to get off the roller coaster; I cried to be on it with her. I hadn't felt so utterly sad in a long time. Next I hugged her mother, whose straining eyes still managed to smile and embrace me, and her sister and father. They are all 5'10 or taller, and their collective warmth I swear envies the sun sometimes, so I felt very small, very sad, and very loved. The third emotion slowly became the strongest. Molly's dad let his hand rest on my shoulder and I put my arm around her sister's waist and we stood for a while together. I felt indescribably connected to them.
It wasn't because I'm so close to Molly that I feel they could be family. It was because grief has an inescapable beauty to it, an intense beauty I can't find anywhere else, a beauty that makes me smile every time I'm slapped in the face by mortality. The beauty is called intimacy...or friendship...or love. And it's the strongest when illuminated by death.
One of my favorite movies ends similarly:
You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.