The chapel was packed. The overflow and the cultural hall were packed to the point of standing room only. There were so many flowers up front, I don't know how they fit them all up there.
I was really nervous. It's been years since I went to church in person because of the pandemic. It was also my first time visiting since we left the ward. The eulogies were beautiful, especially from the former bishop she and I served with in Young Women. So many moments I shared with her came back to the surface for me.
The most important one was the time she invited me over for a girl's night, and we just talked for hours. She wanted to invite me into her fertility struggles, knowing that I'd been through so many of my own. We commiserated over the same frustrations and disappointments with the only fertility clinic anywhere near us. I gave her the best advice I had for any infertile person which I wish someone had given to me: have a time frame in mind for how long you're going to keep trying. Give yourself permission to stop. Don't keep hurting your own feelings more than you can take.
And as it so often happens, she gave up on the fertility treatments when she reached her point of exhaustion without success, only to get pregnant on her own after she stopped the treatments. I smiled when they recounted that story, knowing the hand I played in it.
She was such a good listener. She had a way about her that made you feel like you were the only person in the planet when you were talking to her. I confided in her my struggles with going to church, with the way things are for women who do so much with so little respect and recognition. She loved me in that moment exactly as I was, without asking me to be or feel any differently. I didn't realize it at the time, but that conversation was what put me on the path to returning to church. All because she made me feel understood. Accepted. Loved unconditionally.
It was also the last time I would see her alive.
Seeing her casket, I didn't regret not going to the viewing on Sunday. I want to remember her as she was then. Smiling and laughing with her on her couch, eating pizza and being one of the rare visitors who actually got to see her cat.
I've never been to an LDS funeral where they truly pull out all the stops. I didn't know what happened next. That the family would leave the building to do the burial and the cultural hall was about to be transformed before my eyes. Tables, chairs, centerpieces, plastic cutlery wrapped in napkins and tied with pink bows. In the time it took me to say hello to several of the people I had spotted, it all coalesced seemingly from nowhere. There was one more person I wanted to say hello to, and I already knew where she would be.
I went into the kitchen, and sure enough. She was surrounded by people who were all asking for directions for food prep and presentation for the luncheon. She had just enough time to give me the biggest hug and get a thirty second update on me and my family before she handed me a salad and told me to follow her so she could keep listening. Before I knew it, I was prepping and plating dozens of pieces of cheesecake, chopping lemon slices for water pitchers, running back and forth to refill salads, funeral potatoes, fruit, and dinner rolls.
In all that hustle and bustle, I felt a part of me coming back to life. The one that knew the alto parts to almost every hymn. The one who was loved and remembered to be invited to this, even after all these years. The one who belonged. It all came back to me so fast, it honestly felt like I never left, that no time had even passed at all. I could just pick up right where I left off with a group of people who have already decided that they love me, no matter what.
It was there all along. But it took me walking away, then coming back a different person for me to be able to see it. Thank you, Krista. For everything.
