You Don’t Have to Have A Funeral

How to find meaning in irreverence

There are no unsacred places. Only sacred places and desecrated places.
poet, Wendell Berry

In 2003, I was not yet 31 years old — a young, married woman and by June of that year, I was very pregnant. My husband and I spent this early summer Saturday morning in our basement, packing up for a move to a bigger house before our baby arrived.

As we organized, sorted, and trashed the detritus that accumulates in basements, I picked up the unity candle from our wedding, housed on a dusty shelf. I held it up toward him, “Do we really need to keep this?” I asked.

“Nah, he replied.

We laughed as I tossed it in the bin, and joined in a weird agreement — a self-congratulation of sorts on being the type of people who didn’t need traditional symbols to assure us of the meaning of our marriage. This was something that bound us together, I believed: we were reverent for the “real” things in life and not committed to some performance or unthinking adherence to tradition.

We divorced in 2016. (This is where I am tempted to insert the emoji with the grimacing mouth.)

I don’t mean to imply that throwing the unity candle away was a curse on our marriage. It’s not a matter…