Our Friend film trailer

This film trailer bubbled up on my newsfeed this morning, coincidentally, the day after a friend and I had a pretty intense conversation about memorializing death.

We came down different paths to arrive at different understandings, he and I, but agreed that much of what folks do focuses on the experiences of survivors, which sometimes are only tangential to the life of the departed. Some monuments are less about loss than about the standing of the living, their prominence. And, we agreed, as long as church and commerce are involved it will ever be thus.

Reflection, reticence, regret.

The language we use -- pass, transition -- suggests not a termination but a continuation, a notion that has come down from antiquity, millennia before Jesus of Nazareth talked about preparing a place for believers.

This further suggests that for some of us the judgment of observers might be joined by the scrutiny of the departed. The acreage devoted to the disintegration of the mortal coil -- some count about 25,000 private and for-profit cemeteries in the U.S. -- is pretty astounding.

The crux for my friend is our apparent failure to imagine the dead within those graves, beneath monuments to what has passed, saying to those standing above, "Keep Living."

Our Friend film trailer