A communal embrace
As predicted, Margie Reckard’s funeral yesterday evening was massive.
“Never had so much love in my life,” Basco said on Friday as he beheld the crowds, many who waited in triple-digit heat, to attend Reckard’s memorial service and support a man they had never met.
When Reckard was killed, she left behind Basco, her partner of 22 years, who considered her his only close family. The couple had moved to El Paso a few years earlier and didn’t have many local relatives and friends.
Powerful images of a solitary Basco crouching and weeping in front of Reckard’s makeshift memorial had spread on social media.
Social media giveth and social media taketh away.
Harrison Johnson, funeral director at Perches Funeral Homes, told NPRthat he quickly learned attendance would exceed its 250-person capacity. So he helped make arrangements to move the service to the larger La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center in El Paso.
It was there that people from across the country descended on Friday to wrap Basco in a communal embrace.
…
People passed through the chapel, pausing to pay their respects, then moving along to make way for those waiting behind them.
For hours, the line stretched outside for several blocks.
“Since he opened it to the public, I think it was a way of the community to mourn the whole situation,” said Salvador Perches, owner of Perches Funeral Home, which handled Reckard’s burial for free.
Meanwhile a bomb has gone off at a wedding in Kabul.
Updating to add, after a conversation in the comments.
I hope some of the attendees remain as friends and support.
Indeed.
Fuck, the last line felt like a slap in the face.
Sorry. It took me forever to come up with a last line. I don’t know why I feel I have to have one, but I do – it just feels wrong to end after a quoted passage. I partly wanted to say something about his grim future but I also didn’t. There wasn’t anything optimistic to say that wasn’t already in the quoted passages. Saying something despairing about El Paso or Trump seemed like undermining the quoted passages. Then I thought of another way to point out that meanwhile new mourners are being created elsewhere. It wasn’t meant as a slap in the face but a groan of protest.
Yes, I understand, I just had a physical reaction to it, because it went from sort of sad feel-good (not the funeral, but the outpouring of support) to a furious “fuuuuuck!!!” in a second.
Kristjan, hope you’re getting treatment for the whiplash! That was my same reaction…but that’s so often my reaction to news cycles these days. Something wonderful happens, and it is obscured by sheer awfulness.
Yeah. All that. I do find the outpouring of support immensely moving – it makes me well up EVERY damn time. That funeral in Charleston was the same kind of thing. A fictional version is the episode of The West Wing in which Toby arranges a military funeral for a homeless vet who died in Lafayette Park (across the street from the White House). He breaks rules to do it and Leo yells at him but doesn’t really mean it. Toby goes to the funeral himself, and flinches when the rifles fire. Anyway I find it all moving but don’t want to lose sight of the unchanging awfulness that caused it. If you see what I mean.
I added a clip to the post. Correction: it’s Bartlett himself who yells at Toby but doesn’t really mean it.