I went to a funeral yesterday. I didn’t know the elderly guy who died; I mostly went because my late husband knew him. You get into certain mindsets when you’re married a long time. Stephen always made a point of going to funerals for people he knew, and he would have gone to this one, so I went in his place.

Stephen knew the deceased from an organization we have both belonged to for over 50 years. I have kept up with my membership and still go to meetings, so I knew a few people there when I arrived, and we stood in the sunny garden of Christ Church in Philadelphia, all of us dressed up a little bit, talking about normal everyday things.

Another friend arrived, Kathy, driving the car carrying the wife of the deceased. The elderly widow is not in great shape, both mentally and physically, and I had never actually met her before; that was the first time I missed Stephen that day. He would have had something pithy to say under his breath about her. She drove him nuts.

Kathy, on the other hand, was someone I have known for nearly fifty years. I went over and hugged her. When I first met her, Kathy was a young red-head, new to our group of young people, who got involved with a guy a good bit older than her; she married him and eventually survived his descent into Alzheimer’s. A mutual friend is always worrying about her, because now the former redhead lives far off in a beach town by herself without a car, and I’m always telling the mutual friend to stop worrying. We are allowed to make bad decisions now that we’re old, just as we did when we’re young.

“Did you know Kathy from the old days?” another friend asked with a little bit of awe when I came back from embracing her.

“Yeah,” I said, and Stephen would have explained with pride how I had been around our organization a few years longer than Kathy. He took great satisfaction in my accomplishments, as if they belonged to him as well. He was my designated bragger.

It was an impressive Episcopalian service with full Communion, which startled me, but it turned out the deceased had been Diocesan Secretary. Stephen, who was a staunch lifelong Episcopalian, would have known all about what a Diocesan Secretary does, and would have gossiped with me in an undertone about who was active in the Diocese; he would have had opinions about the new rector of Christ Church, a woman with a quiet voice, and about the guy who gave the homily, a priest from Oaks who shared a fondness for Star Trek with the dead guy. There were a few other people I knew in the church, though I didn’t know many of them well. Stephen would have known them very well. He knew everyone. Everybody loved Stephen. They had no idea how he talked about them behind their backs. I swear he married me so he would have someone to dish the dirt with.

I hung out for the disposition of ashes. Stephen wanted his ashes to be in the columbarium at St. Mark’s, the Episcopal church the other side of Center City Philadelphia where he used to belong, but when he was dying I explained to him that there was too much incense at St. Mark’s and so I wouldn’t visit him there after he died (I have asthma). Stephen liked my second choice, though, because it’s in a pretty suburb with lots of trees, and because I said I would visit him there.

I came away, and for quite a while, the rest of the day, I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling sad. I hadn’t know the deceased, or most of the people there. Then I realized I missed Stephen’s snarky gossip and his vast knowledge about other people.

The other reason I was a little sad was that I keep expecting to see people I know, when I go to events involving the organization I belong to. It saved my life 52 years ago, but you see, I was pretty young when I joined it, and most of the rest of the people who knew me then are dead now. I was young when I married Stephen, too. It feels as if everyone who knew me back then is gone, and as if I am some kind of fraud because I have no one left to be a witness of when I first showed up.

You know, I think maybe this is what it’s like to be old.