"All the lonely people, where do they all come from?"  Like many of us, my wife and I have been doing a lot of streaming lately.  The other night, we came across a movie called "Still Life."  It tells the story of a person, a person employed by the government of Great Britain, whose job it is to identify people who die without familial survivors and provide suitable funeral arrangements for them.  His goal is to ensure that all people are "laid to rest" with a measure of dignity.
     Tragically, shortly after this person, John May by name, set up his final funeral (his superiors, concluding that the dead did not deserve the level of support he provided them, had terminated the funding for his position), he was hit by a bus and died.  He was forty-two.  Because at some point earlier in his life John had made the necessary financial arrangements for his funeral and burial, his church had a funeral for him.  Except for the priest, no one came.
     No one was present for his burial, either.  After his coffin had been laid in the grave and the grave diggers covered it with dirt, however, magic happened.  One by one, the "spirits" of all those for whom John had arranged a dignified exit from this existence appeared over his grave.  Ironically, it was death, not life, in which John received the most honor.
     The Beatles's words above refer to a certain Eleanor Rigby who, as the song tells us, died and was given a funeral to which no one came.  If death is the end, then, yes, John and Eleanor's deaths are deeply unsettling tears in the fabric of our existential complacency:  who really cares?  If death is not the end, as the movie fancifully portrays, though it remains profoundly unsettling, it in fact matters far more than the fullness of its grief can bestow.
     Birth, a "life after life after death," will come.