A Memoir of Death

I don't know how to deal with death. And frankly, as you'll come to learn, I don't truly know how to deal with any emotions properly. But what is properness? If not an excuse to force everyone into the same cramped bubble of commonality. A reliable and sturdy structure the bigots of a forgotten era established to make everyone grieve with the same placid outline so no one cries too much, or too little for the matter. But I didn't understand why I cried that day. I don't think I ever truly will.

My mother had prepared me during the treacherously boring car ride on the way to the small church. Tucked behind some forgotten cafe and dust ridden pathways only driven upon by the mourning families who sought the idle structure for a false sense of peace.

You can cry if you want to, she had said. The stale scenery to my right out of the grease smudged window was more interesting than this conversation, so I let it keep my attention instead of my mother. I had hardly known the women. She was a grade school friend of my mom's, but that was all she was to me. If I push past the haze of some idle summer some years ago, I can recall a turnaround trip we had taken to Vegas. The dank smell of her tasteless vehicle and it's white fading paint chipped from the corners upward. Vintage she had called it. Vintage my ass, it was more like a beaten down horse who refused to run even if you cracked a whip over its hindsight.

So I don't understand why the silvery taste of grief pooled in my mouth when I walked through the chapel doors. It was late in the evening and the sun had already hidden itself behind the crevices of the teetering mountains looming somewhere to the east. Coward. I thought to myself. The night air was not still and shockingly cold, the polar opposite of the stale and placid atmosphere that hung within the enclosed walls of the ancient building. It wasn't the actual funeral we'd gone to that evening, but whatever the event was that was held the night before for a small and select group of people. The VIP event I named it. For people who cared too little to show themselves on the actual day, but too much to live with their subconscious sense of duty to not show at all.

I had never seen a dead body before. And I was planning on saving that deflowering for when my grandparents or some distant relative passed in the jumble of months that my life dragged through. An event for someone who I actually had a connection to. An event, I told myself, where deserving tears could fall freely, and with just cause. That sounds harsh actually. I did care about the woman in the casket and her plump, overly painted face. She was kind to me when we were together, and a hospitable host to myself during the fleeting moments I spent in her cramped up home some years ago. But I hadn't expected to feel the way that I did on that brisk evening. Not for her at least. She was, frankly, a stranger to myself - a relic of my mother's past - a past she hardly mentioned and one I knew, with the exception of some moments, longed to forget.

So when the grief filled my airways and seemingly choked the living hell out of me before resting like an overly indulged meal in my gut, I didn't know how to react. The acid-like taste of sorrow and remorse that pooled in my mouth was foreign to me. As foreign as the faces that greeted my mother with starch hugs and listless words. I had gone rigid and stiff, almost as much as the body at the front of the chapel.

Maybe it was the atmosphere that had consumed me like those sweltering July evening's my mother and I had spent in Georgia when I was younger. A hungry force that clawed at my mind, heaving loads of estranged guilt on my shoulders that made me want to fall on my knees or run out of the condensed room entirely. But I could do neither. Instead I watched from the small entryway. Looking toward the mannequin like figure, waiting for her to sit up or bat an eyelid. But she never did. So I took my place at the back of the hall alongside my parent as she exchanged hushed whispers with the corpse's sister to her right. Saying my name and looking in my direction occasionally, as though she was introducing me at an auction.

I don't know when my eyes began to swell, or when tears began to pool under the soft skin and run down my sweltering cheeks, leaving striated stains where my makeup had once been. I cursed myself internally and tried to fight the muddled mass growing under my eyelids. I didn't deserve to cry. Despite being told that tears were a formal part in grief, I didn't want to follow the steps of remorse that had been burned into every god fearing child since our early days at sunday school. Denial, then grief, then acceptance. Replay it like a worn out song for each passing and you can trudge through life saying you're competent in your sorrow, and learned how to accept God's unrelenting pattern of taking lives and bringing new ones in to fill their place.

I hadn't known her well enough to shed tears for her. So why did I feel so heavy with remorse? And more so with guilt? I should have forced my mother to talk about her. Pulled it through her teeth if I had to. She was young. Older than myself, but somewhere around my parent's age. Too young to die. I was sorry. Sorry I didn't remember her properly in life. Sorry, that before I'd entered those doors, I didn't want to mourn her in death. I watched as a stream of jumbled faces crowded through the entryway, like a wave of scattering fish trying to find their place in the sea. Familiar ones popped up here and there. My uncles, two of them, who held me briefly then took their place beside my mother and the women's sister. I heard the same phrases repeated to the elderly couple I took as the corpse's parents at the front of the room. Thinning hair and angular bones, as though they were trying to poke through the thin fabric of flesh that clung to their bodies. I cried harder for them, I think. At the thought of having to lose a child. At the thought of the reversal in roles.

And then the face of distant memories trotted through the door and locked eyes with my own. I hadn't seen the young women since we were children, yet she looked the same as I remembered her. The familiar childish features and lanky body that stood stretched and awkward for a female. She wore it well though. It had been years, yet when I forced myself to stand and wrap my arms around her, it felt as though no time had passed at all. She embraced me tighter then I had expected, nudging her face in the crook of my neck, despite being inches taller than me. She felt like a child clinging to her mother after a hellish thunderstorm, afraid to close her eyes in the surrounding darkness. She was the women's goddaughter. I didn't want to cry anymore, but her warmth and her grip made me tremble. I bit my cheek as unrelenting tears pooled on her shoulder, staining her black blouse an even more ominous color. I cried for her. For her loss. For my current state of self hatred. I was never noisy in my grief, and neither was she. So the only sound that escaped us was the sniffle of noses struggling to keep in their contents.

She didn't let go for a long while, so neither did I. It was a mutual acceptance of one and other. Yet I felt ashamed when we drew back with red eyes and swollen lips. I didn't deserve to take part in her grief, she had known the woman better than I, but she showed no contempt afterwards when she looked my way, only emptiness behind two brown and glazed pits sunken in her skull.

I repeated that phrase in my mind for the continuing hours. I didn't deserve to share these people's sorrow. I shouldn't be crying. Yet the tears wouldn't stop falling, and the pooling taste of agony and remorse only grew thicker in my mouth with each passing minute. So much so that I was afraid if I talked to any one person within close proximity that they would be able to smell it. So I refrained and only conversed with family members and the girl. Though even that wasn't much.

My uncle told me stories of the overly painted women that lied in the casket. Long forgotten memories from highschool and early adulthood. She was vivacious, lively and even scandalous at some points. But she didn't care apparently, so neither did I. Who was I to judge? However, those words only weighed heavily upon my guilt and self loathing. Made me feel smaller in a room of adults with titan sized memories of a person they cared for dearly, when I only had a parcel of ancient and bland crumps to offer. Not even crumbs, only a single fleeting memory from an unrecallable number of years ago.

That evening was a minefield of overbearing emotions. I was never fragile, and that was something I prided myself on. Yet each glance from a tear stricken stranger, each cold grip of a hand on my shoulder, made my body feel frail. As though the feeble structure of bones and skin might collapse under itself. No words were formally spoken by a priest, only hushed whispers among the darkly cloaked guests. Each amble voice stuck me from the inside, as though I'd swallowed a small needle that's palpable only when I turn or stretch a certain way. "Loss." "I'm sorry." "Sad." "Horrible." "I'm here." Strike after strike the phrasing and vocab imbedded itself in me like shrapnel from a mine, originally unbeknown to myself, then suddenly lunged in my chest, weighing down on my soul. Why were they sorry? Why did they say they'd be there, when even I knew, after the crowds dispersed and the casket rolled away, that with an exception of a semi-annual phone call paying their respects or making up some mind nulling small talk, they wouldn't be there. People could hardly manage grief of their own, much less lend a hand in somebody else's.

That's when I felt the sweltering wave of anger rush up through my feet, as though Satan himself were taunting me with an upcast flame from hell. "You see?" He'd whisper, a malicious grin plastered on his enthralling face and carved cheekbones. "They don't really care. No one does. it's all done for people with an aptitude for selfishness. An excuse to call themselves good samaritans, a reason to stare into the face of a lifeless corpse and call it their daughter, niece, family member or friend, so the guilt that overwhelms them for not being there when it mattered doesn't swallow them whole." I hear him laugh, and I sit with balled fists of cream white knotted over my thighs, and yet the tears don't stop. Not through the anger, or the self loathing, or the acceptance, that, in the end, funerals are nothing more than a desperate attempt of gathered acquaintances that are trying to cling to an already departed soul. In their selfishness, they paint a corpse, dress her up and display her like a mannequin in front of an audience of people who barely knew her, like myself. All in the name of good will, and responsibility, and properness. It's proper to defile a body and dress her unbeknowingly, paint her all over and crimp her hair, to allow the egocentric citizens of this world to say goodbye so they can bat their eyes peacefully at night. It's proper because we've done it for a thousand years, so we'll do it for a thousand more. My stomach knots under my dress, and the color has already run from my face to hide in some crevice under the rest of my skin. It's proper because it's what all God fearing children must do, the token they must turn in order to spring their soul into the gates of the immortal afterlife.

Then call me a heretic, who indulges in blasphemous talk I thought to myself on that day. The entire concept made me want to jump from my skin, and it still does. But I held my ground for the rest of the evening, out of respect for the women in the box. And eventually, my tears stopped falling. In their wake stood only swollen eyes, a red stained nose and streaked cheeks no longer counseling the acne under my makeup.

The evening air was as brisk as when we had entered, and I quietly praised the ground I walked on to be out of that smoldering hot box of unbearable emotions. I believe in God, if that's what you're thinking at this point. I have always and will always believe in God, but what I came to realize, is that I don't believe in the ways of the Catholic Church. Scold me if you will, call me a heretic or a whore, it makes no difference to me. Cremate me and throw me over the ocean I say, but don't lock me in a coffin and chain me to the earth. My family can come and see me at the sea's edge whenever they please to subside their guilt or grief, but not in some outdoor prison alongside row after row of tombstones. I could never express the feeling of anger or contempt I had for the way things were done that evening, and frankly, I still can't.

But if it put her parent's mind's at ease and took the burden of sorrow off of her sister's shoulders, so be it. You will not be getting any such accommodations from myself however, because I saw something everyone else that night did not. And that was the hollow crevices of brown empty eyes that resided on the young lady's face who I had embraced so many years ago now. She was not pleased, nor was she relieved. She didn't want to be in a room full of semi-familiar faces who only offered starch hugs and empty forgiveness. I wanted to take her hand and run her down to the shore. I wanted to rip her shoes off and guide her through the waters of the sea under the ocean of stars that glinted above us. That was where she could find her godmother, I thought. That was where she could make her peace and see her once more. Not in the blank faced corpse at the front of the chapel, for she didn't reside in that body any longer. Instead she would be sitting with us at the ocean's edge, as we watched the candescent midnight water sprawl over our feet like stretching limbs. Make your peace, I'd say. And her eyes would no longer be sunken and empty, instead they would be tear brimmed and glowing with a melancholy sadness. I would smile, and within that moment, I would realize that when my time comes,

That is where you'd find me as well.

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