Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we went with a friend to a memorial service for someone we'd once been close to but now hadn't seen in years.  My intention was to honor her life, and our years being friends, but I became detached and unemotional.  I didn't open my heart.  Afterward, when my husband and I were home alone, he said he'd been similarly unmoved.  And I realized no one in the room had been crying, except perhaps the immediate family, and that the atmosphere was something we were feeling and reacting to.  It was strange, and we both felt like "bad" people.  I had always been sympathetic to this person's challenges in life and her horrible childhood, yet at the service it felt like very old news.  There was praise from coworkers and her sisters.  But it felt like something was left out, as if there were several elephants in the room.  We couldn't mourn her properly because she wasn't portrayed as human.  She was perfect.  And as that was not the woman I knew and loved, I think I shut down.  What I'd assumed would be a healing ritual didn't appear to be so for the people who attended.  It was a perfect service, but that organization shut us out when we should have been embraced.