Celebrating Our Children, Ourselves, and Others
We all have the opportunity to celebrate each day. We have little things to take into consideration, like the fact that we woke up that morning, or that we made it safely through a storm that day, our car started on a cold morning, we made it work on time, we accomplished a big task at work, our child made a good grade on that test he/she was studying for, or we got that promotion for which we’ve been working so hard. All of these are reasons to have small celebrations! We might find ourselves doing little ‘quiet dances’ to ourselves or saying a genuine ‘thank you’ to those who helped us along the way once we’ve accomplished these things, but we are still celebrating the fact that it happened.
Just as with weddings, retirement parties, and birthday parties, we come together to have celebrate the life of someone, to celebrate who they are, what they’ve done, and the impact that they have made on the lives around them. The interesting thing about this is, we do the same thing when we attend memorials and funerals. We talk about the person’s life, who they touched along the way, the kind of person they were, and we talk about the good times that they shared with their friends and family. In either kind of celebration one would hope that funny stories would be told to make everyone smile and hopefully laugh. That’s why a lot of people have changed the term ‘funeral’ to ‘celebration of life’. Being ‘mourned’ does not sound like an experience that anyone would enjoy. Hopefully everyone would want to be remembered and celebrated long after they are gone for the life that they lived.
