What do you wear to a funeral these days anyway?

Yesterday was so hard. There I sat, just a friend of the family, but I couldn't stop putting myself in her their shoes. She was a sister, a daughter, a wife. I cried through the whole service. We all did. She was too young. Too beautiful. Too awesome of a mother to her three children.

I stood at my closet for an hour that morning- trying to figure out what to wear. All black? Dressy? Casual? Dress casual? Then I thought about how she went, and I just sat down and put my face in my hands. Trying to figure out what to wear- what a stupid, trivial dilemma.

The ceremony went so slowly. The family told stories of her past- how she loved to shop. How her and her sisters would slide down the stairs in sleeping bags when they were young.

When her dad went up to the mic he spoke so eloquently and with so much grace. He said, "I want you to know that through this whole tragedy not one person in this family has looked to God in anger and asked 'why?'. Not one of us."

I spent the rest of the day with my family and in the evening went out to the dock at sunset. Someone made a joke that I should take a dip in the lake. "the water's nice!" And a few minutes later, minus my phone and keys, I jumped into the lake-fully clothed. It was pure joy. And later, we all gathered on the deck, dripping wet, to watch the sun fall behind the trees. Nobody spoke as the sun fell farther and farther, until it vanished beneath the horizon. Oh, how we wished we could bring it back.