Vox Meditantis

What’s the biggest social rule you ignore because it’s pointless?

I stopped dressing up for funerals about three years ago, and I think that’s when I finally understood what mattered in this city.​

The realisation came at Mason Foster’s service at Mount Olive Baptist in the winter of 2022. Mason had been a fixture in the Riverside District for forty years – ran a small engine repair shop out of a garage on Fourth Street, the kind of place where you’d bring your lawn mower and end up staying for an hour talking about the Eagles or the state of Market Street or whether the new riverfront development was salvation or another form of eviction. He died suddenly at sixty-three, heart attack whilst working on someone’s snow blower, probably the way he would’ve wanted to go if he’d had a choice.​

I showed up to his funeral in my work trousers and a clean jumper. Not because I didn’t respect Mason – I respected him more than most people I’ve known – but because I’d been helping his widow sort through paperwork all morning, trying to untangle the mess of his business records and personal finances, and I hadn’t had time to go home and change into the expected uniform of grief. I walked into that church genuinely worried someone would say something, that I’d somehow dishonoured his memory by showing up looking like I’d just come from actual work instead of performing the theatre of formality.​

Nobody said a word. Or rather, what they said was: “Thank you for helping Janet.” “Mason would’ve appreciated you being here.” “You want some coffee?” Not a single person commented on my clothes. And as I sat in that pew, surrounded by people in their Sunday best and people in their work uniforms and people in whatever they’d been wearing when they heard the news, I realised something fundamental: the people who knew Mason, who’d actually lived alongside him in this city’s decades of struggle and survival, didn’t care about the costume. They cared that you showed up.​

The Performance We’re Taught

I grew up in New Corinth in the nineties, in one of those neighbourhoods near the old textile mills where you could still see the bones of what the city used to be. My parents – dad worked logistics at the Business Park, mum was a teaching assistant at the primary school – they taught me the rules: you dress up for church, for weddings, for funerals, for job interviews. You wear the tie even when it’s uncomfortable, you polish the shoes even if they pinch, because that’s how you show respect. That’s how you signal that you’re serious, that you care, that you understand the gravity of the occasion.​

And I followed those rules for years. I wore the suit to every funeral, the collar slowly strangling me whilst the priest talked about dust and resurrection. I wore it to my grandfather’s service in 2015, sweating through the jacket in the August heat. I wore it to the memorial for my buddy Dave, who died of an overdose in 2017 when New Corinth hit eighty-nine opioid deaths and the city felt like it was drowning in grief we couldn’t dress formally enough to contain.​

But somewhere along the way, the performance started to feel obscene. I’d be standing in a church or a funeral home, wearing clothes I’d never wear anywhere else, surrounded by people doing the same, and I’d think: who is this for? Not for the dead – they’re beyond caring about our wardrobes. Not for the family, most of whom would trade every pressed suit in the room for one more ordinary Tuesday with their person. We were dressing up for each other, for some abstract standard of propriety that had nothing to do with actual mourning and everything to do with social performance.​

What This City Taught Me

New Corinth has a way of stripping away pretence if you let it. This is a city that hit 127 murders in 1993, that watched the Iron Works close in 1978 and take 1,200 jobs with it, that’s spent decades trying to figure out what it is when it’s not what it used to be. The riverfront where I sometimes walk after work is lined with converted warehouses and new flats, but you can still see the rust, the old gantries, the ghosts of the industrial muscle that once defined us. We’re a city that’s been gentrified and forgotten in equal measure, too small to be Philadelphia, too stubborn to disappear entirely.​

Living here teaches you what’s essential. I’ve watched neighbours show up for each other in crisis after crisis – the woman down the street who organises meal trains when someone’s sick, the guy who runs the corner shop who lets people run a tab when money’s tight, the informal network of residents who keep track of the elderly folks living alone and make sure they’re okay during heat waves or ice storms. None of these people are performing. They’re just doing what needs doing, usually whilst wearing whatever they were already wearing.​

That’s what Mason’s funeral clarified for me. The people who mattered most in that church weren’t the ones in the fanciest suits. They were the ones who’d helped Mason repair engines when he was short-handed, who’d checked on him during the pandemic, who showed up that morning to help Janet because showing up was what mattered. The dress code was irrelevant.​

The Freedom of Letting Go

Since then, I’ve made it policy. I don’t dress up for funerals anymore unless I’m already dressed up for some other reason. I show up in whatever I’m wearing – work clothes, casual clothes, whatever reflects the actual day I’m having whilst processing grief. And I’ve extended this to other performances too: I don’t pretend to enjoy networking events where everyone’s workshopping their personal brand. I don’t force small talk about the weather when real conversations are available. I don’t send Christmas cards to people I haven’t actually spoken to in years just because that’s what you’re supposed to do.​

Some people probably think I’m rude. The older generation especially – people who came of age when New Corinth was still prosperous, when formality felt like armour against the city’s decline – they sometimes give me looks. But I’ve found that most people, especially the ones dealing with actual hardship, appreciate the honesty. When I showed up to help sort out Mason’s paperwork in my work clothes, Janet didn’t care what I was wearing. She cared that I understood the insurance forms, that I’d make the phone calls, that I’d sit with her whilst she cried about the impossibility of grief and bureaucracy arriving in the same week.​

It’s Christmas Day as I write this, and I’m at my parents’ house in the same jeans and flannel shirt I’ve been wearing all morning whilst helping dad fix the temperamental oven. My brother showed up from his suburb wearing a jumper that probably cost more than my monthly grocery bill, and my mum made a comment about me “making an effort,” but it was half-hearted. She knows by now that I make efforts where they count – I brought the wine she likes, I helped with the cooking, I’ll clean up afterwards without being asked. The costume is negotiable.​

What Actually Matters

The biggest social rule I ignore is the one that says formality equals respect. I’ve learnt – partly from this city’s decades of stripping down to essentials, partly from watching who actually shows up when things fall apart – that respect is in the action, not the outfit. It’s in the phone call you make, the casserole you bring, the paperwork you help sort, the time you give. It’s in showing up at all, which is harder than people admit.​

New Corinth taught me that. We’re a city of people who’ve survived steel mill closures and crack epidemics and slow-motion gentrification, and we’ve done it by showing up for each other in our work boots and our exhaustion. The Delaware River that defines our geography doesn’t care how we’re dressed when we stand on its banks. It just keeps flowing, thirty-five to forty feet deep, carrying commerce and history and the possibility that what matters isn’t what we wear but what we actually do with the time we’re given.​

So no, I don’t dress up for funerals anymore. I show up as myself, in whatever I’m wearing, ready to do the actual work of mourning and supporting and remembering. And if that breaks some social rule, if it makes me look like I don’t understand propriety or respect or the proper performance of grief – well. I’ve made my peace with that. Because in a city that’s spent fifty years learning what actually matters when everything else gets stripped away, I’ve learnt that the biggest pointless rule is the one that says the costume matters more than the person wearing it.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.