Smile when I’m dead.

I’m in the car.

I’m stuck in late afternoon traffic, with Bam Bam chomping  quietly on a biscuit in the backseat.

I stop at a red light and look out my driver’s side window.

It’s a cemetery. There is a burial in progress. There are about 15 people gathered before the gravesite.

The rest of the large cemetery is deserted. I suppose a weekday, late afternoon service, isn’t exactly in “prime time.”

The whole thing is so basic- a small group of people, without ostentatious flowers laying everywhere.

They each hold a single red rose. Some of them hold hands, and some have their arms around each other.

But they are all smiling.

I don’t know if the priest is saying something light and amusing, because all I hear is the song Little Bird from the Indigo Girls CD being played in my car. All I know is every face that I look at is smiling. A sweet, misty-eyed kind of smile.

I sigh as the woman behind me honks her horn to alert me that the light is green.

It’s weird- the random things that strike you. That thirty second traffic light has stuck with me ever since. I witnessed a snipet of a burial and it left me… happy.

When I die, I want people to smile like that at my funeral.

To smile,

not because I died,

but because I lived.