
Most people don’t go to funerals on New Year’s Eve, but we did, because that’s the way things went in 2024. It was an unexpected funeral, for the mother of one of my wife’s (Caitlin’s) childhood friends.
She was admitted into the hospital on Dec. 23, had surgery on Christmas Day, then abruptly passed in the early morning hours of Dec. 26.
She was 67. It was sudden, it was tragic, and it’s the second time in three years that this particular friend had to bury a parent around Christmas.
Losing both parents before your 37th birthday isn’t something anyone should have to deal with, yet here we are, and there we were, in a beautiful cemetery on the side of Purgatory Mountain overlooking the riverfront town of Buchanan, lowering another person into the ground.
Black clouds stretched from horizon-to-horizon. Far across the valley, a quarry had peeled away a large swath of mountainside vegetation, revealing a stone skeleton underneath.
The preacher told a story from the Bible I couldn’t quite follow, one that ended with “know that Christ is your only path to eternal salvation.”
A representative from the funeral home soberly informed us that the service had concluded, and just like that, it was over. It felt like we could reach up and touch those low-hanging death clouds, standing there on the side of Purgatory.
Earlier that morning, my father-in-law, (Tom, or Papa) met me at our home in Staunton, and we drove to the funeral together. Papa is a sharp-dressed, gregarious man who stands six-foot-six. He was born in Kentucky, and although he’s spent the majority of his life in Florida and Virginia, his Southern drawl follows him around like an old bloodhound.
He’s a natural storyteller, and I’m a natural story listener, so we get along well. He told me a few tales during our hour-long drive to Botetourt: the one about how his friend Tuna, an old buddy from the ‘90s, died of a heart attack on his honeymoon.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, because that did seem like the worst possible time to die from a heart attack, or to die from anything, for that matter.
Then Papa said something else: “My friend and I were walking the other morning, and he believes in karma and that kinda stuff, and I kinda do, too, like each life you come back a little higher or lower in the chain, and he told me he had a dream the other night that he was a plantation owner, that he owned a bunch of slaves. He felt like this was an image from a past life, and that he was being punished in this life because of the way he’d treated people back then, that he was doomed to live alone because of what he’d done.”
I figured that made about as much sense as anything else: which is to say perfect sense, and no sense at all.
We walked into the funeral home, which is right off Exit 162 in Botetourt. You can hear the tractor-trailers thundering past from the parking lot. I signed the guest book and picked up a small paper program for the service. On the front was a picture of the deceased and her late husband, with the words “together again” written underneath.
I tried to put it in the front pocket of my jacket but found something blocking its entrance. I reached in and pulled out a clump of tissues and another small program that I’d gotten from a viewing we’d been to earlier that year, for one of Caitlin’s high school friends who died unexpectedly at 35. I’d originally bought this suit for a wedding, but it was quickly becoming my go-to funeral suit.
It was a sad funeral, as most tend to be, but not as hysterical as expected, because as Caitlin’s friend had said the night before, she was all cried out. There would surely be more tears in the future, but for now, the well had run dry.
The preacher had an anxious but jovial energy, riffing on bible verses that may have had some connection to the situation at hand, ending his monologue by proclaiming that God is a “loving, just and merciful God.” It’s a fine sentiment, and I understand why people need to believe it, but it landed awkwardly, considering it hardly seems loving, just or merciful to rip a mother away from her daughter, a grandmother away from her grandchildren, and on the day after Christmas, to boot.
Maybe the Great Mover has a reason for forcing these unspeakable tragedies upon us, maybe there’s a divine plan behind the heartbreak that we’re simply not privy to because our perspectives are too myopic. But in times like these, the idea of a benevolent God lands like a bag of trash in a dumpster.
“How many people have prayed for their daily bread and famished?” wrote Annie Dillard, poet laureate of the Roanoke Valley, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
When I say “times like these,” here’s what I mean: 2024 was a year saturated with death. I’ve written about it before. We had to attend that New Year’s Eve funeral, sure, and Caitlin’s childhood friend died at the age of 35, like I said, but also her grandfather passed away, and perhaps most tragic of all, her mom (Terry, Mama) died in April after a five-year battle with multiple systems atrophy.
There were other departures, too, but I’ll spare you the details.
I know death is inevitable, and there are other families out there who have suffered greatly, too, but this past year has felt uniquely concentrated with mortality laid bare. Like 10 years worth of heartbreak crammed into 12 months.
I have videos on my phone from previous New Year’s Eves of our family lamenting how challenging the previous year had been, holding onto tempered hope that the next one would bring better luck.
On that front, we’re still waiting.
There’s a verse in a poem by the late great Charles Simic that goes like this: “A meek little lamb, you grew your wool/till they came after you with huge shears/Flies hovered over your open mouth/Then they, too, flew off like the leaves/The bare branches reached after them in vain.”
All of us will at some point be that meek little lamb, trembling in fear of huge shears. In those lines I see no room for mercy. No room for God, either, though others may have a different interpretation.
After the funeral, we drove in a blinkered procession to that beautiful cemetery on the side of Purgatory Mountain, which towers like a God over the James River and the town of Buchanan. It was almost 50 degrees, but looked and felt like snow. The rock quarry loomed like a sinister entity climbing out of Earth’s broken skin, perhaps gripping huge shears in its massive palms.
Caitlin’s friend placed her hand on her mother’s silver casket for the final time, and out of nowhere I felt the hot pressure of tears behind my eyes. That night, the world would stay up until midnight, dancing and kissing and getting drunk. Tomorrow, it would be 2025, though under that gloomy mid-morning sky, it seemed like a meaningless distinction, another arbitrary human creation. It was hard to fathom how it could make a difference.
After the funeral, we visited Papa and Caitlin’s old neighbors, near the town of Fincastle. From the driveway, Papa could see his old home, the two-story farmhouse they sold in 2020, across a rolling pasture he used to bush hog and ride horses in. There was a hot tub on the front porch that Papa would sit in every night after long days of driving FedEx routes he and Mama owned at the time. On certain evenings, you could sit in that hot foaming water and watch the moon glowing high and free over the Blue Ridge in the distance.
They laughed and fought and rejoiced in that house for 20 years. It’s where Caitlin and her sister were raised, but now it felt as distant and untouchable as the moon. Papa stood there gazing at it, hands in his leather coat, the sky still low and black.
“There’s a got dang light on in my bedroom!” he said. Several weeks earlier, Caitlin had a dream: she kept breaking into this house, determined to make it hers again. At first, the new owners were livid: get out and stop doing this! they shouted. But after the fifth or sixth time, they started to pity her. Eventually, they let her stay. I guess she became part of the family.
In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard wrote “I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”
Open to time and death painlessly, this is how we sometimes feel after a funeral: cracked open, reminded once again of the fleeting nature of existence, wondering why we waste our time on trivialities when people die on their honeymoons, when a sinister beast is climbing towards us with huge shears, when our own funerals are scheduled for tomorrow.
For a few hours or a few days after the service, we float in a state of reflection, resolving to live life with the recognition of mortality perched on our shoulder like a wise crow. Sometimes we sustain this perspective for more than a few days, but even when we inevitably lose it, it always returns, usually in small profound moments, like when we stand amazed by a stunning view on a mountainside cemetery, an army of caskets resting silently under our feet.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag.