My friend Kelly's Cremation was yesterday

Ice Cream was served at my friend Kelly's cremation yesterday!

In May one of Laura and my closest friends died suddenly. This was a shock and very hard on us both. In Thailand, one tradition is to wait 100 days and then have a cremation. It happened yesterday.

This was my first cremation service in Thailand. It wasn't too much different that how I imagined it. Two things surprised me. First - someone (family?) was serving Ice Cream. Kelly's mom approached me and handed me an Ice Cream cone. It's probably the LAST thing I would have ever expected Kelly's mom to be doing at the cremation of her daughter!

At first I didn't like the idea that there was Ice Cream being served. It somehow seemed irreverent. But then, as I thought about it, I like it more and more. It puts something social at the middle of the pain. There is death, but there is also ice cream. And you are sharing both with other people who also have experienced a great loss. I don't know if that's why they did it. I don't know if it's common in Thailand or not. But it made sense.

In Christianity we mix the social and the serious all the time (esp when the social has to do with food). The Lord's Supper comes to mind as the ultimate example of that. It's one of the last things Jesus does with his disciples. He gives them what is perhaps the most visible Christian ritual (communion). And it's done in the context of a meal. (Of course, they are eating a Passover meal which is another example of the religious significance of the role of food!)

So Ice Cream at a cremation gets a thumbs up.

The other surprising thing was the lotto salespeople were out trying to sell tickets to the mourners. This one didn't sit well in the beginning and still doesn't. In Thailand there is little to no segregation of sacred and secular. I once had the father of a bride receive AND TAKE a mobile phone call DURING his daughter's wedding ceremony. I wasn't surprised the phone rang. BUT HE TOOK THE CALL. Nothing is off limits. But it seems that lotto tickets at the crematorium should be off limits.