I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.
Maybe that sounds heavy, but I think once you reach a certain age, you start noticing it more. The names in the headlines hit differently. An actor you grew up watching. A musician who scored some chapter of your life. Someone who felt eternal because they lived inside your memories, even though you never actually knew them.
But that kind of grief is different. It’s the kind you can feel from a distance.
Then there is the other kind.
The kind that doesn’t trend.
The kind that shows up at your own front door.
Many of you know, in the Christian tradition, Ash Wednesday begins Lent. Ashes are pressed onto your forehead in the shape of a cross, and you hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
It is one of those rare days that does not let you look away from the truth.
We are physically here.
And one day, we won’t be.
Not too long before this past Ash Wednesday, I stood at my uncle’s funeral. His name was Kris Tetrick. He was an entrepreneur, a Cleveland firefighter for decades, and the kind of man who spent his life running toward things most of us would run away from.
A few years before he passed, his son, and my cousin, Johnny Tetrick, also a Cleveland firefighter, died tragically in the line of duty. To me and my other cousins, Johnny was a superhero.
He still is.
Two men from the same family.
Two men who ran toward danger.
Two men who loved people well.
Their stories are not fully mine to tell. Not really. Not properly. 7 minutes on a podcast, a short column in the paper, or a short story feature on NPR would not even begin to hold their stories.
But I loved them and admired them.
At my Uncle’s funeral, I was asked to be a pallbearer.
I said yes.
And there I was, standing with one of my cousins and a group of Cleveland firefighters, helping carry my uncle’s casket. First to the hearse. Then later to the gravesite. Then lowering him into the ground.
And all I could think was, wait a second.
Twenty-five or thirty years ago, I was working construction for my Uncle Kris. I was a young kid, a grunt on his crew, cleaning up job sites, mopping floors, doing work I did not always want to do.
But he was teaching me.
He was showing me what it meant to work hard, to build something, to carry yourself like a honorable man in this world.
Back then, he seemed full of power and vision and charisma and strength.
And now, all these years later, I was helping carry his body back to the earth.
What an unbelievable honor it is to help shepherd the bodies that helped raise us.
Through all that emotional fog, an old memory came back to me. When I was twelve years old, I wrote a question down for my teacher. She handed it back and said, “I’ll never be able to answer this for you, but one day you’ll know.”
The question was this:
If my brain is what makes me think and feel and remember, then when my brain stops working, do I just stop too? Like a candle when the wax is gone and the flame cannot keep burning?
Or is my brain more like a radio?
And the real me, the thinking, loving, laughing, remembering part of me, is something the brain picks up and plays?
If the radio breaks down, maybe the music stops here.
But does the music still exist somewhere else?
I think my teacher was right.
Maybe that is one of those questions we only get to know eventually.
As the bagpipes played “Amazing Grace” and I walked away from the burial site, I still did not know the answer.
But for the first time in my life, I felt closer to it.
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