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What is it about death that brings a family closer? It looks like someone has to die in order to get a full family gathering. Instead of a birthday, or a reunion, or even something as simple as a graduation would normally bring everyone together, but not this time. Not this time around, it's happy. When you have over 40 people gathered in the same place, of the same family, for the same reason, it's never anything happy.
After everything that goes on during the duration of one day, there's never really any time to just sit down and take off your shoes. Between people visiting, the tears and all the sayings of, "I'm so sorry", and the dealing with the affairs, the final goodbyes and kisses, you never really have any time to just think.
Maybe it's a good thing. If you thought about anything, it would be in instant tear-trigger. Your eyes were red, puffy and sore from all the crying, and the sides of your nose looked like something from a paint can. Everyone was running around, down the streets, into cars, in and out of buildings and going everywhere but to a chair.
You didn't even have time to eat.
Whether it was your first experience with death or your seventh, it still hit you the same way. With a devastating blow to the chest. You could feel it in the pit of your heart, even though you tried your best to ignore it, and tried the best to keep yourself so busy with everything that you couldn't have time to listen to it, to feel it. But it's there. It's there waiting.
And when you finally do have the time to just sit... You don't know what to do. At a restaurant with mother and sister, you all talk of the memories that made you laugh, and the others that made you cringe. It didn't hit you hard because it was still waiting. It was waiting until you were alone.
When you entered the house it was quiet. It wasn't something you were used to. It was something that you would begin to hate. It was already something you hated. You half expected to see them as you walked in the door, but your heart knew that they weren't coming back. Having someone around you for the some-odd years that you've been alive, or the some-odd years you can remember and then walking around for just one day without them is odd.

During life, you're used to talking to someone's soul through their body. You begin to love them. You begin to love their soul, not their body. Their body is only the thing that carries their soul. It's nothing more than a place to be trapped inside until everything they needed to do was complete.
Their compulsive behaviors, their odd habits, and their sicknesses are all gone once they die because it was their body that held them. They would finally be free of everything that made them miserable, they would be free and peaceful, and happy.
That's something that you need to be happy for also. Even though you're sad and upset that they had to leave you before they got to witness everything that you were going to do, you were happy that they could be with their predeceased family once again.
If only they would have waited two or five years.... If only.... But then that means that they would have suffered more.
So it's something that you have to learn to let go. Yes, it will be a struggle, and yes, you will grieve for many months in the future, but if you know something, know this.... “Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”