The Funeral

[Had to play with it for class, which annoyed me greatly.]

In 1993, my twenty year-old cousin fell off a bluff in the Ozarks.  He was drunk and lighting off fireworks, celebrating the birth of a nation.  Needing to urinate, he wandered off into the Missouri night, and fell through a hundred feet of summer darkness.
             
I remember a clip-on tie and the crying.  It was something I didn’t understand.  My eight year-old mind could name it, but I couldn’t see it or touch it.  What is this strange and stagnant cloud?  We drove through Missouri a couple years later on the way to Galveston, Texas.  The cliffs seemed impossibly tall, and I could see him.  Hair whipping back, hands searching and beating at the air, feet kicking wildly.  There’s nothing to grab on to—just fingers slipping down opaque eternity.  I wanted to scream a hundred feet of thoughtless and primal terror that my lungs might burst and an instant of ———
           
He was buried on a sunny day in July.  The sunlight glinted on the sunglasses and the wind played requiems in the graveyard trees.  I remember thinking the silliness of everyone looking so nice for something so awful.  I also remember thinking, Someday this will be me.  But I don’t want it to be soon.  I was scared of heights, then, like I’d never been before, my health became assailable, and life became temporal.  No more tightropes for me.
           
In March of 1996, my grandmother died suddenly in her grandmother’s rocking chair.  My grandfather walked into the kitchen for a glass of water, and she asked him to pour her one.  That’s how my grandpa learned that a person can die silently and painlessly in the time it takes to fill two glasses with water.  He straightened her hair and touched her cheek, remembering a cold day in spring fifty-five years prior.  She stood in a floral-patterned dress outside the church as the cars filed out.  He asked her, Where do you live?  And she responded, Take me home and find out. 
           
My tie was real, now, and black.  My father had sat me down before the funeral and taught me a full Windsor, informing me solemnly, It’s the only knot for a thing like this.  The pews were uncomfortable, but pews always are.  The sermon was a blur, and the platitudes and stories pleasant but lost to memory.  The family sat together, with me directly behind my grandfather.
           
I witnessed something ineffable as a husband of fifty-three years shed silent tears in a country church.  He didn’t move an inch during the entire ceremony, paralyzed by the emotion, but the tears trail-blazed tracks that shone in the church half-light.  I was scared of love, then, and the overwhelming immensity of it.  But I wanted it anyways.  I was no longer scared of meeting girls, then—only afraid of them leaving.

Another cousin died in April of 1997.  He liked to drink too much.  Well, I suppose that’s unfair; he didn’t really like it that much, and he even grew to hate it, but he did it anyways.  He worked as a blackjack dealer in a casino just outside of Wisconsin Dells.  The constant barrage of people squandering their fortunes took their toll on him, and he drank away the memory of their internal lethal cocktail: a lack of self-control and hungry desperation.  The elderly bothered him the most—they tottered up to his table, gambled away their retirements, and tottered off with tears in their eyes.

One day, he drank himself to sleep on the Interstate.  At the visitation, his mother hovered over the open casket; a curious man might have searched for the strings that must have been holding her up—heaven knows where those strings would have stopped.  I wasn’t yet twelve, but even I could read her thoughts.  What sort of god would steal away two of my three children?  I wasn’t there when her daughter was buried in 1980, but my nose picked up its ghostly residue.

The makeup on his face struck me as terribly unfair.  What man in death wouldn’t be seen for what he was?  For what he is?  He’d bought me a book of card tricks for Christmas four months prior, and even then, the love of his occupation and the hatred of his job had warred across his youthful face.  As I gazed upon him, then, enshrouded in an inscrutable peace, I understood that death is more even-handed than life could ever be.

Grandfather left some little time later, and I was growing tired of funerals.  Sitting in the same pew in which I’d bid his wife farewell, I could mouth the rotes of the minister’s rites.  Grandpa had been an incredibly intelligent, well-spoken man, with a love of literature I’ve never seen equaled.  I recalled a poem he’d quietly recite to his wife, and hearkened onto one half-stanza:  Thus life by life and love by love/We passed through the cycles strange/And breath by breath and death by death/We followed the chain of change.  It’s when those chains slip and they speed through our hands that we lose count of the links and our palms burn with their own blood.

Mom cried with a sense of bereavement beyond me.  Her living, genetic past was gone, her mortality reinforced, a foothold on posterity reduced to a tenuous toehold.  Her family had lived in that house for 160 years, buried in the same cemetery:  Each in his narrow cell for ever laid/The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.  As my mother wept for her past, I understood that my brother, sister, and I were her present and future.

My uncle died of a heart attack in July of 2002.  He’d just finished building a deck, and laid down for a nap.  He didn’t feel well, he said, and then he died.  I was away at tennis camp at the time, and only found out when I called home on a payphone. 
My clothing tastes had changed little in nine years.  I defied tradition and ditched the black tie, but kept the full Windsor knot.  I still preferred dress suspenders to a belt.  His youngest daughter, approximately eight years-old, wore a lovely little dress.  She was all black cotton and ponytail.  I remember her in front of the fountain behind the church, wordlessly gazing upon people as they streamed past.  I was a pallbearer, and the brass handles seemed too cold for the heat; it should be noted, carrying a dead body, even if you can’t see it and it’s hiding behind hundreds of pounds of polished wood and metal fittings, provokes a peculiar feeling if you dwell upon it. 
           
When my cousin saw the casket moving down the aisle, she broke into tears.  They were the kind that don’t stop, the kind that rack your body and rend your ribcage muscles and you can’t see.  But she could see her father in a box, and she suddenly understood.  I told myself, I’m just seeing a good man home.

I was angry, now, by the time my other grandfather died.  He was eager to see his wife, I’m sure, and he was ready to go.  My red-eyed dad accepted a triangle of star-spangled cloth from another dad. Shells from the church door echoed through the vaulted chambers inside the church and inside of me.  Taps wrenched my insides tighter and tighter until my eyes burst open from the pressure.  And I thanked a non-specific god that I occasionally believe in that a man might see a woman that he’s missed for thirty-one years, and one I never met but had imagined for twenty-three.

This was April of 2008.  I was older, but still seventeen, bearing my uncle down an eternal aisle.  I was sixteen, quoting Langdon Smith and Thomas Gray; eleven, shuffling a deck of cards and folding my hand; ten, weeping for someone else’s love; I was still eight years-old, fearing something I didn’t understand. I was scared of time, then, but I could finally comprehend it.  Existence is borrowed, and eventually we all return it.