This is going to be a rather depressing entry, but I hope you will still read this in respect for Claire Yu, the little girl who left this world last Wednesday (June 24, 2009).

She was five years old, and lived here in Plano. She went to our church, and the first and only time I met her was approximately last year, when I babysat for her parents. She drowned in a community pool (I don’t know where) by falling in the water (she apparently couldn’t swim) while her dad was busy watching her older brother’s swimming lesson. He looked away for just a few minutes or so, and they found her corpse floating in the water near the shady area of the pool. I know. It sounds like something that you would see in a horror movie of some sort. But it really happened.

I went to her funeral this morning…and it was a rather new experience for me, since this was the first funeral I’d ever gone to (if you don’t count the funeral of my grandmother when I was two, which you probably shouldn’t because I don’t remember anything about her or her funeral). As I sat there, attending the funerary mass (I’m Catholic), several thoughts flashed around my mind:

1. Life is full of surprises. Who knew that that little girl would drown in a pool on that particular Wednesday? I’m sure she herself and all the people around her hadn’t even given a single thought about death and several times more about her going to first grade after summer. I doubt it that on the last day of school, she walked out of her elementary school wondering if this was going to be the last time she would ever see the building. This led me to think about my own last day of school, and sort of feeling a dull apprehension about how unpredictable life is. Her funeral made me realize that NOTHING is predictable. I or you or your neighbor can randomly die sometime today, this week, this month, this year. Depressing, but true.

2. As I sat there, I couldn’t help but think how stupid worrying about things like SAT, high school, GPA, cliques, college, boyfriends/girlfriends (etc) really are. As the priest bluntly pointed out, the only thing that is for certain in a human’s life is death. Why waste time worrying about things that might not even happen? Of course, by saying all of this, by no means am I saying that we should all just spend all day in bed until we rot or something, but this experience has allowed me to realize that every single moment in life is precious (cliche, I know, but so true) and worrying about the future seems like such a waste of time.

3. What really happens after death? Although I am a Catholic, I’m not really what you’d call devout. I do have doubts now and then about the afterlife, and this was one of the moments where, even as my mouth was praising the lamb of God and the heavenly pastures, my mind was racing around in a futile attempt of correctly guessing what happens after death.

4. The Goths and all those emos in the world have no right to wear black all the time. Black, I think, should be limited and only be worn in funerals. Her funeral has made me realize this because the little, cramped hall was just too…depressing with everyone in black. I doubt many people in this world will still want to wear black ‘just because it “matches the color of my soul” or “looks cool” ‘ know what an awful, scary atmosphere a room full of black creates.

5. Speaking of colors, I also saw that pink is not always a happy, happy color. The girl’s coffin was a light pink. It was, second to black, the most depressing color I’d ever seen in my life. I don’t know if it was because the little pink box was surrounded by a room of black or what. But I will probably never look at it the same way again.

6. I saw. Her. Corpse. … It was my first time seeing a dead body, and strangely enough, it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Which led me to think back to the priest’s sermon about how death is really a very long sleep in which we await until we get to meet with God. She really looked as if she were sleeping. Sure, there were some gray areas around her face and her facial expression did look uncannily like the one on “Daisy”, the little piglet I unfortunately had to dissect. But I could really understand why how in some books, they describe the dead person as looking as if they could just be asleep. She just looked so peaceful, and there was even a trace of a smile (enigmatic like the Mona Lisa’s) on her lips.((Which baffled me because I would think that one would not be smiling right before you asphyxiate.))

7. And of course, because I am human and maybe a little more self-centered than norm, I couldn’t help but think of my own funeral and wonder who would come to it. Would my family in Korea fly to the United States? Probably not, they can’t afford it and don’t have the papers. Would friends from other states (California and Florida) come? Probably not. Some of those people I haven’t seen in more than five years. Would I have a Korean service like the little girl had or an American one? I personally would prefer that my parents chose to do an “international” one, so no one would be confused. What songs would they sing at my funeral? Probably Catholic church music. But would they sing the Gothic/ones in a minor key that I love so much? Probably not, considering the fact that the ones in her funeral were the ‘too-optimistic’ ones that I don’t like. Would my mom look as fragile as Claire’s mom looked in front of the coffin? Would my dad be like Claire’s dad and try to dab away the tears forming in the corner of his eyes? Probably.

8. Her funeral also served as a sort of wake-up call for me. Other than little idle thoughts here and there, I’d never thought of the possibility that I or any one else could die so early. Sure, my grandmother died when she was fifty or so and my uncle died when he was forty…but I guess it’s true what they say about teenagers. A large part of me largely assumed that young people in this time and society were virtually ’safe’ from death until middle-age. But looking at the fragile, doll-like girl in the coffin sort of brought me back to reality. It made me realize how limited my time on Earth is and that I should not waste so many days of my life when I could be doing something more…productive. (Yes, this means I’m going to start writing/working on my novels more.) As my favorite song from Muse wisely reminds, “Our time is running out.”

Because of this experience and newly-gained realizations, I am eternally grateful to Claire and wish her luck in the afterlife.

In pace requiescat. Claire Yu (2004-2009)