In My life I’ve Been to More Funerals Than I Can Count on One Hand
by Elle Lombardo
In my life, I’ve been to more funerals than I can count on one hand. Eventually, I stopped keeping track—not because I forgot, but because remembering felt like carrying stones in my pockets, dragging me under. I think about the Titanic sometimes, how people dressed for dinner while the ship tilted. We do the same at funerals, pretending not to notice the sinking beneath our feet, the low groan of the church floorboards. The basement always smells the same—burnt coffee, incense, and carnations wilting in their vases. I used to think that scent belonged to death, but maybe it’s just what happens when memory sits too long in one room.
Sometimes I wonder if grief has a dress code; black clothes, polite smiles, and a promise not to cry too loudly. Still, even in that room of wilted flowers and whispered prayers, something in me keeps reaching for air, even when the cold existence in the casket was the only thing keeping me afloat. And even in that moment when I don’t know how im going to continue on, the girl inside who kept saying she wouldn’t make it to 16 decides in each of those moments that she would live on for everyone in that room, because she didn’t want to be the reason her family felt the way she felt in that moment, and maybe that’s what funerals are—a rehearsal for holding ourselves together while everything around us begins to sink. I think about how survival isn’t always loud; sometimes it’s just the quiet act of showing up again. Some days that means getting out of bed and pretending the world isn’t still cracking beneath me. Other days it’s remembering to laugh at something small, like a crooked flower in a grocery store bouquet or the way a song I used to cry to now just makes me hum. I’m still learning how to live without sinking, how to turn memory into something lighter. Maybe healing isn’t about forgetting, but about carrying things differently—like holding a stone in your palm instead of your pocket. The world keeps tilting, but somehow, I’ve learned to find balance on its edge; maybe the point isn’t to stop sinking, but to realize we can still breathe beneath the surface.
