Four Weddings and a Funeral...but not!

Four Weddings and a Funeral is a classic Brit flick; it also seems like a reasonable ratio for matches and dispatches. In the last year we were in the UK we went to four weddings, although we attended two funerals. However, here we’ve been confronted by human mortality in a way we’ve never had to face before. We have a friend who’s been here six months, just a little longer than us. In that time she’s attended four funerals and a wedding. Not a month has gone by without us hearing of an unexpected death within the family or friends of people we’re getting to know. It’s all quite sobering.

Today as we stood outside a graveyard in the biting cold our friend said: well, if I’ve learnt one thing this year it’s that you don’t know when you’re going to die. It’s the sort of line that could have been said to bring a bit of black humour into a bleak situation. But the reality is we’re all struck but the utter reality of the situation. It’s not so much that you’re left thinking ‘will it be me next?’ but ‘if it was me next, then what...?’ When you see the loss, the suffering, it’s hard not to ask the big questions. But we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that ‘why?’ is almost certainly going to remain unanswered.