“People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.”^[1]

Just as the stork is associated with bringing a baby into this world, the crow is associated with carrying the soul out of this world.^[2]  Movie ideas, old legends and other belief systems have a mass of stories about birds bringing death (or life).  Many of these are so very fantastical and one has to wonder how they ever came to be.  One of my guesses is that perhaps it was simply an attempt to make sense of the unknown.  While you and I may not believe in babies coming from storks or crows carrying the soul, there is one thing that is real… life is real… and death. 

Last April, I had the honor of officiating my grandmother’s funeral
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Life has a funny way of going on around us.  So many times we spend our days getting bent out of shape in this “hurry up, get it done, don’t slow me down” world of ours. 

We blow by possibly hundreds of people a day and never once stop long enough to know a single thing about them.  We get mad because we have to wait an extra 60 seconds in line at the store, because the clerk isn’t going fast enough, or the person paying can’t find their checkbook.  We get angry at those who cut us off in traffic, cut us off in line, and we never stop once to think about why they did it, or, for that matter, why they thought is was okay.  We don’t know a thing about them.  Traffic bites, someone next to you in the elevator smells funny, the waitress messed up your order, the rude guy on the corner, the woman with the noisy kids.  I could go on and on.

Now,
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