Blanks

 I was thinking of funerals the other day--I don't know why, maybe something I saw on a TV program--and I realized that I have no recollection whatsoever of my brother's funeral or of my father's. I remember indistinctly that at my mother's funeral, the pastor, apparently contracted through the funeral home, had no idea of who my mother was. Can't blame him, really. What did he have to go on? I don't remember talking to him, so he must have just been making some generally suitable comments. It seems strange that I can remember nothing at all about the other funerals. I do remember some gloomy events that directly followed my brother's funeral, and my father getting roaring drunk, and a campaign launched by my brother's wife and friends to sue to doctor who had been treating him (and which eventually went nowhere). And yet about the funerals themselves, nothing. Surely I was there. I cannot think of any reason I wouldn't have been. Nonetheless, it is a perfect blank. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The memories in general that I do retain tend to be hazy down through the years back to my very early years, where they sharpen significantly for some reason. The most recent decade of my life has pretty much disappeared, and so I am often surprised by some event recorded in a Facebook post or in this blog. Even so, they seem, eerily, to have happened to someone else