By Doug Forbes

It has been nearly six and a half years since I was in a funeral home— the same amount of time Roxie walked the earth.

My father died a horrible death due to the ravages of Alzheimer’s. He was 83. Roxie died a horrible death due to preventable drowning at her summer camp. She was a little, little girl.

There’s nothing like the flaxen light and gluey air of a funeral home. It’s as if you die.

It’s nauseating. It’s otherworldly. It’s everything you would expect and nothing you would want. This wasn’t my first go-round with such a place. Two grandparents. One aunt. My dad. Friends. And now my baby.

This particular funeral home is Cabot and Sons of Pasadena. A placid 70-something principal with sobering voice helped us navigate through decisions that we thought Roxie would make for us one day.

The three of us sat at an oval mahogany table replete with high-gloss varnish to fend off decades of persistent teardrops. Spread about were a catalog of urns, various contracts, gold pens upon which the business name was emblazoned, even a complementary book called Heaven is for Real about a boy who believes in the pearly gates.

We’re used to homework spread all over the kitchen table. Not documents that deal in death.

I am an anti-theist. Any god who thinks my daughter is better served in some fluffy other-world with my dad or with Elena’s grandmother is a cruel god. People continue to volunteer “thoughts and prayers” because it quells their very own unease about the truth of life and the truth of death.

We are mortal. We are accountable. And we are vulnerable. This is my religion.

I have had the privilege of knowing and working alongside deeply devout folks in a variety of nonprofit ventures. We agree to disagree about what we know and what we don’t. But we do not disagree with the idea that life is precious. And life is short.

In Roxie’s case, life felt like one morning, one afternoon and one night.

And though it was morning when we sat in that funeral home conference room, it felt like night. We decided on an urn and added signatures to an itemized price list of cremation services. Our Cabot and Sons representative excused himself from the room. A few minutes later, he returned to tell us that he and the family had further discussed our circumstances.

They decided to waive all service fees—worth thousands of dollars.

We drove away from an otherwise gruesome moment in our lives with a glimpse of the type of humanity that enabled us to put one foot in front of the other that particular day. And when the days that immediately followed were not so kind, we used the memory of that simple gesture as a vital reminder of the good in an often brutally bad world.