The Funeral You Missed
“You’ve already died. You just didn’t attend your own funeral.”
There is no ceremony. No obituary draped in lilies. No gathering of cousins you barely know, telling stories about the same face you wear. There is only the quiet slipping—unnoticed, unannounced—of a version of you that once believed they would last forever.
You died when the monster under the bed became dust beneath it. You died when the moon no longer posed a question. You died the afternoon you did not stop to name a cloud. Small deaths, everywhere, like snow. You stepped forward, of course you did—school, jobs, passwords, promotions—but the one who stepped back was not the same one who stepped forward. What you fear is not death. What you fear is the roll call of endings you never grieved.
The Lie of a Single River
Society tucks a clock inside your chest, then swears it’s a compass. Be consistent, it says. Be yourself, it adds, as if that were a single object you could hold up to the light. The myth is elegant: you are a river with one name, flowing cleanly through the years.
But you are not a river. You are a delta—many-mouthed, many-minded, spilling selves into the same sea. You are a mosaic of funerals pretending to be a portrait. The five-year-old who spoke to pigeons in fluent wonder; the fourteen-year-old convinced love was a red notebook passed in secret; the twenty-three-year-old who equated success with salvation—these are tenants who paid with entire seasons of your life and moved out at night.
Names are tombstones. We carry them kindly; we forget what they mark.
Look into the mirror and it lies politely. It shows you a shape, not its history of ghosts. It confirms a continuity your bones have already betrayed. Even calcium forgets; even marrow revises the script. Every seven to ten years, a different body files your taxes.
Continuity, the Gentle Con
The mind is an archivist with a drinking problem. It stitches yesterday’s costume onto today’s actor and calls the masquerade I. It edits out the awkward entrances. It refuses to notice that the one who loved that song is not the one who changes it now. This is not hypocrisy. It is survival through storytelling.
Consider this kindness: if you knew, with surgical clarity, each time you shed, you would be inconsolable. So the mind seals the casket quietly and ushers a new self onto the stage with a familiar name tag. Continuity is the velvet rope we drape over a staircase that never ends.
• The self who prayed because everyone did. • The self who laughed at jokes you no longer find harmless. • The self who said yes to be loved. • The self who wore ambition like armor and slept in it.
We call it maturity, or wisdom, or “finding ourselves.” But the arithmetic is simple: you have died more times than you have lived. Multiplicity is not a flaw in your soul. It is the way your life arranges itself to keep going.
The Eulogy You Owe Your Past
This is not a manual or a healing protocol. It is a mirror held at midnight, a little cruel because honesty often is. I will not tell you you are special. I will not promise transcendence. I will only suggest that ungrieved endings ferment into hauntings.
Think of the mask you put on for that job and forgot to take off. Think of the dream you outgrew but refused to release, so it kept living as resentment. Think of the apology you never spoke to the teenager who tried their best with the tools they had. These are unburied bones. They rattle the present.
Grief is how we return dignity to our discarded selves.
Hold a short service. It can be a page in a notebook. It can be a walk where you speak aloud the names of the versions of you that did not make it. “Thank you,” you might say, “for carrying me through that winter.” Gratitude is a shovel that does not accuse. It merely makes the ground soft enough to lay someone down.
On Fear (It Isn’t Death)
They say fear of death is the deepest fear. They are wrong. The terror has already happened and made a home in your routines. Not the final silence, but the cluster of silences after each lost self you never mourned. The self you edited to be employable. The self you slimmed to be desired. The self you muted to keep the peace at dinner.
Here is the scandal: you called this survival. Sometimes it was. Often it was surrender disguised as strategy. The bill arrives as numbness. You feel “fine,” by which you mean absent.
Tombstones and Time Travel
You speak of your past as if it belonged to you. It doesn’t. It belongs to someone who used your name and left you the receipts. Memory is not a museum of preserved selves; it is a city built on ruins. The tour is beautiful. The foundations are bones.
Does this mean authenticity is impossible? No. It means authenticity is a verb, not an heirloom. You make it daily, like bread. It goes stale by dusk and must be remade tomorrow by whoever you will be by then.
Rites for the Living (Who Keep Dying)
What do we do with a procession that insists on our name? We create rituals sturdy enough to hold a moving target.
1) The Ledger
Keep a list called Selves I Am Done Being. Write one sentence of gratitude and one of release. Sign it. Date it. Bury it (a drawer counts). Do not reopen. The point is not nostalgia; it is notarization.
2) The Wake
Set a chair at your desk for the former you who still tries to run the meeting. Ask what they fear. Thank them. Kindly remove them from the agenda. Love is authority without humiliation.
3) The Inheritance
Each self leaves you something—an instinct, a scar, an angle of seeing. Name the gift aloud. Wear it consciously or put it down. Ghosts become ancestors when they are given a job.
The Ethics of Shedding
There is a danger in all this talk of ending: that you will use it to excuse carelessness. “I am not that person anymore,” you might say, when what you mean is “I do not want to face what I did.” But the procession is not amnesia. It is responsibility across versions.
Write letters that begin, “I used to be someone who…” Then finish with a reparation, not a defense. The point of funerals is not to forget the dead; it is to remember how to live with what they leave behind.
Identity as a Verb
Consider grammar: we treat I as a noun. Fixed. Singular. Useful for signatures. But what if I is better understood as a verb—ongoing, conjugated by weather, company, hunger, mercy? What if you are not the thing that stays but the motion that continues? The baton that passes hands—left hand to right, child to adult, lover to stranger, stranger back to friend.
This reframing is not despair. It is permission. You do not have to keep being the person you no longer are to protect the story you once told.
Small Practices for a Moving Self
• Rename your days. “Monday” says nothing. Try “Repair,” “Begin Again,” “Carry Lightly.” Let language cue the version required.
• Change your handwriting once a month. Let your body confess that identity is manual, not metaphysical.
• Archive your bios. Date them. When you introduce yourself anew, let the old ones remain true for who they described.
• Keep a museum of errors. Curate them like artifacts. Read the plaques: “This tool saved me in 2019; it injures me now.”
On Love (And Its Funerals)
To love anyone across time is to attend many funerals with them and choose to stay for the wake. You will love versions that vanish. They will love versions you are not finished becoming. Some romances end because the relationship dies. Others end because two decent people outlived the form that once sheltered them.
Call that grief by its right name and you will not poison the memory. Call it betrayal and you will haunt yourselves unnecessarily. The bravest sentence in any language is: that us is over, and it was good.
Work, Titles, and the Paper Masks
Careers are costume departments. Every promotion demands a fitting. You keep the outfit long after the role is over and wonder why you cannot breathe. If a title cannot flex around a changing person, it will crush a living throat. Retire uniforms when the parade has passed.
What Survives
If so much keeps dying, what remains? Not facts about you; not even your favorite color (that, too, will migrate). What persists is a certain way of turning toward—a tenderness for strays, a suspicion of bullies, a hunger for wide rooms with open windows. Call it your signature of attention. The procession carries that banner from one version to the next.
Perhaps that is all soul means: the manner in which different yous recognize the same horizon and walk toward it, each in their own gait.
Closing the Gate (For Now)
You’ve lived a thousand lives. You’ve died a thousand times. Still you wear your name like armor and whisper every morning, I am—never noticing that the one who whispered yesterday is already gone. This is not tragedy. This is the page turning. This is literature written in bone and habit.
Attend your missing funerals. Speak the eulogies simply. Build altars that fit in your pocket. Then walk on, lighter, not because you finally found yourself, but because you stopped forcing a single self to carry the weight of an entire crowd.
You were never the one who died. You were the procession. You were never the mourner. You were the grave. You were never the end. You were the vanishing.