FUNERAL

I was woken up early by a phone call from my Other Uncle.  My grandmother was dead.  I pictured her sheltering me and my sister under her raincoat when there was a sudden hailstorm when we were little. I pictured her making coffee and eggs for my sister and hot goat’s milk and sugée biscuits for me, I pictured her rubbing my feet.  I cried, surprised at my own soft, limp body.

She was still at home where she had died, and if I wanted to see her before the funeral directors picked her up, I had to go with my mother now.  It was tempting to cry, but there was a kernel of deep privacy within me, telling me that if I wanted a proper farewell, then I needed to be alone.  I needed no-one to be watching me, comforting me, reacting to me, but for my confrontation with this loss to be unfiltered.  I don’t think that I fully understood then anything beyond the impulse for privacy, or that I knew the size of the experience I seemed to be preparing for.  At the brink of  a young teen, it would be the first time I’d seen a dead person up close.

Arriving at the funeral home I was thinking about the fact that my grandmother was gone, wondering whether she’d suffered, considering our past together and that I wouldn’t see her again.  I was nervous, of course, but my mind was not paying a huge amount of attention to the fact that my gentle grandmother was now a dead body.

When I entered the room, I immediately understood that this would not be as I expected.  I really was innocent enough to think she’d look pale and sleeping, an impossibly still version of the figure I recognized.  Instead, her mouth was horribly made up with crimson hues, her hand stretched down to her sides like a person in coma.  Rather than still, she looked frozen – she looked like a corpse.  Her face was not a peaceful thing without conscious life – a stone, a brick – but something from which life had been sucked with force, a tree smashed by a hurricane.

Though the coffin was opened for all who knew her to pay their respect, I couldn’t take another step.  I stood in the doorway, bowed over with weeping.  I found that the words coming out of my mouth were ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ over and over again.  I was also absolutely terrified.  I could barely bring myself to look at her for an entire second, let alone go closer. In my terror I also felt embarrassed and pathetic.  I was crouched in a corner, unable to even turn the lamp on.  Death was massive, I was small.

Tears of Rain

I stood there for a long time watching afternoon light move over her body.  Finally I slowly managed to take a few steps closer to her.

The shock subsided, and I felt the strangeness of having a mind that is able to meet death, witness its reality, and yet persist despite this shattering.  What had seemed wholly unacceptable shifted, and like a Magic Eye picture, suddenly came into view in a completely different shape, as something that could be borne.

I also felt a fascination.  This was my dead grandmother, really dead, really here.  I managed to walk closer to the coffin bed, and eventually sat down in the armchair next to her.   I leaned over and saw my Uncle John, her youngest son kissed her on the forehead.   It gave me courage to stroke her hair, remarkably still a deep black, with silver round the temples, and told her I loved her.  At the same time, I was able to look at the hard and jagged thing she had become, and understand that she was nowhere in the room.  I weaved around the back to the room, to make way for the relatives to bid their good-byes.

For days afterwards, traveling on the bus, eating at home, or reading in bed, the unmistakable vibrating thrum of my heart popped against my chest as I lay down.  The same loss permeated those foggy days of grief with a strange ecstatic lightness, and an odd hysteria of the kind that makes you want to laugh out loud in a silent lecture theater.  A weird new understanding of the world was filtering through into my consciousness.

When I first know Grandma, I had absolutely no idea what she was about, given I was a toddler.  It seemed like a nonsense poem, a surreal word game.  But reiterating it, the simple narrative of the Grandma emerged: An old woman, seemingly poor, has died.  At her funeral or wake, actions take place which seem to undermine the solemnity of the occasion – men whip ice cream for the guests, women dawdle in informal dress drowning in tears of rain, and even the funeral flowers come in the humble casings of white Asian chrysanthemum. The narrator asks that the old woman be covered by a sheet from her own handmade patchwork throw, one which her ‘thorny feet’ poke out of.

Rainbow To Heaven

An old dead woman, but I wouldn’t say that’s why the loss feels so hurting.

She was a forceful, even violent, representation of the glory, impossible victory of life over death.  Death is terrifying and impossibly big, but life is even bigger – vulgar, relentless, ruthless.  Her protruding feet seem cruel, but it doesn’t matter because she is ‘cold and dumb’; she has fallen by the wayside and growling, virulent life quickly fills in the gap.  The sexuality and materiality of the ‘muscular one’ making ice cream and the ‘wenches’ dawdling are both jarring images in the place of death.  But it seems that this jarring quality is also the source of life – that nothing can stop it, that it never can stop.  The eating and making of everything that lives will keep breaking over us like waves crushing a dam.

No illusions, no seeming, no fakery.  Her death is not treated with tenderness, but nor is it without meaning.  From it comes a ‘finale of seem’, an end to the shushing rule of the dead, the bowing and scraping to ancestor and tradition and history.  The dead are unfrozen from their position as overweening watchers who make demands on the actions of the living.  They are liberated from being symbols or warnings and able to revert to being bodies who were once alive, and now are not.  At the same time, the fashionable standards the poor old woman aspired to, with her ‘dresser of deal’ and ‘embroidered’ sheet, fall away.  The need to impress is gone, and the rules of class, status and position are shown to be flimsy fantasies in the yawning jaw of ferocious life.

What lived was part of life and it is that force which remains.  Their death is not them, and is not of them.  Her death matters because it tells us about her life.

Her favorite

Reading her face, we feel an urge to locate morality in her life.  But however we prod her, she refuses to be good or bad, to fit into the strictures of our human version of reality.  We want to find the morality in her life, in the same way that we’re desperate to find the morality in the natural world; wondering if a fox gorging on chickens is cruel, or instinctual; trying to see ourselves in ravens circling round a corpse.  But there are no straight forward moral dimensions here, only the terrifying force of onwardness, of life perpetuating life, trees growing vulgarly over old graveyards, insects making homes in the cavities of fallen deer.  Her death is ruthless because it is absolute.  It is a nonhuman power, and it is not of us, though it passes through us.

I thought of the times my grandmother had undone fear for me, pulling at the knotted skein of wool before my eyes.  I was a nervous, sensitive child, prone to terror. Once, when something on the television got too much she said, ‘Don’t worry, they’re just actors, and then they finished their scene, they all went for a nice cup of tea afterwards!’  Or, at the haunted house, where I had a full-blown, hyperventilating panic attack.  Seeing my terror, she immediately turned to the nearest vampire (actually a taciturn staff member named Joe) and made him take us out the back, past the mass of wires that controlled the flickering lights within, now raw and naked as they hung on the innocuous plastered walls.  She had shown me that the truth can undo terror, that what is real may be awful, but it can be, must be faced.  When I left her home I was no longer scared.  My grandmother’s deadness, which had made me stiff with fear, was not a thing hiding in the shadows, death as a black hooded figure waiting to take us somewhere terrifying, but an absence.  Once, she had been very alive.  She had a long, strange, imperfect, troubled, joyful life – perhaps even too short for her liking.  She had one marriage, children, worked as a humanitarian, seen the world, suffered and been happy.  She had been old, then very old, then sick, then very sick, then dead.  We were alive.

I had promised her daughter my mother, years ago, that I would wear the straw weaved funeral clothing and straw shoes at her funeral march.  So now I had to actually get up there, without crying?  Actually, in the end, it was easy.  It was so easy.  I never knew how did I get the courage, and surely without tears, with fears and without a heartbeat, I was able to carry my body onward and forward fulfilling her wish as her favorite grand-daughter.  I did not hold the joss-sticks, neither did I kneel down to pray.  But I did pray within my heart with my God to watch over her in the Light of Heaven.  Her coffin was hard cardboard, as she’d wanted, and I had scribbled with messages and pictures from all the living years I had spent with her.  I felt no need to cry.  Once, she had been alive.