The meaning of life is a question that’s been pondered by philosophers, scientists, artists, and everyone else for most of recorded human history. What is our purpose here? What are we supposed to be doing with our lives? Does anything we do *actually* matter?
As I attended the funeral proceedings on Monday for my friend, Mayor Kevin Forrester, I pondered this question, as I do at most funerals. I knew Kevin’s funeral would be busy, and I arrived a good half hour early: plenty of time, I was sure.
I fully realized how busy it was when I tried to park.
Not in the parking lot of the church, nor in the alleyway, and not anywhere on the two blocks around Sturgis Presbyterian, but across Junction and down two blocks away in front of a residence, I found the closest place to land. Everyone involved in Sturgis government, politics, outdoor sports, and every possible walk of life seemed to be there already when I walked up.
As I entered the building and signed in, I was directed up the hall to a balcony. A quick head count of that floor alone was over 200 souls, below many more.
Standing Room Only was the way to describe it. As I was watching the video showing pictures of Kevin and his family from his childhood into recent times, I still thought about that “meaning of life question”, even as the pastor discussed God, accomplishment, his sickness, and finally his death.
If accomplishment is the meaning of life, the metric for it is difficult to rank. There is no good way to rank accomplishment other than happiness in success. However, achievement-based happiness still depends on ambition, and the ambitious man could end up achieving a lot more before he’s *happy* with his accomplishments.
If an ambitious man who achieved so much was never happy, did he ever live?
If the meaning of life is simple biology, many people accomplish its goals before their lives are over. Your genetics inherently want to replicate, and by surviving and reproducing, you accomplish the biological goals of your DNA; nothing poetic or philosophical about this perspective; it’s concrete and simple.
But biology doesn’t put hundreds of people just on the balcony of your funeral.
Listening to the eulogy about Kevin, the list of accomplishments went on for a long time. He was an accomplished man, from winning titles as a racer, to establishing his own nationally recognized trails, keeping the county efficient, becoming mayor as the Sturgis government faced a crisis, and having three sons of his own on their way to also checking off a lot of accomplishment boxes in their lives, the metrics of accomplishment and biology both seemed met.
Throughout the funeral service and later at the luncheon at the Loud American in Sturgis, more people kept arriving. Each stray entry, another testimony to life lived.
I thought about the tragedy of the event, as I often do at funerals, and that is that Kevin would have loved the community getting together as it did Monday. The unfortunate truth is that it often takes a death to bring people together. The irony is that the person who would have enjoyed it the most is always missing for the only event that all of their family and friends from every walk of life attend at the same time.
I don’t think anyone gets to solve the meaning of life, but the measure of a man at the end of the day is often told by the number of people who show up for you on the day you don’t have a way to thank them for it.
You don’t find the meaning of life; no one does. You make it yourself, just like Kevin did, and if you do it right, there will be Standing Room Only at your funeral someday too.
Dedicated to the life and family of Mayor Kevin Forrester.
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