No One Died When I was Young
When I was young…as far back as I can remember…I’ve had a problem with death.
Not the whole “I don’t understand” problem, quite the opposite.
I was quickly ostracized as a child, because playing cops and robbers…or cowboys and Indians (my apologies, i didn’t know it was racially insensitive when I was seven) when someone got shot or hit with an arrow…I cried.
Again…let me clarify. I didn’t cry. I did deep, wretched, wailing-wall sobs that would eventually make me throw up and choke and I was absolutely inconsolable.
I knew it was pretend. I know my friends were just playing at being dead. I still could not control it. Trust me, I tried. I was embarrassed that my friends thought I was stupid and thought they were really, for real, dead. I tried to explain I knew they weren’t dead but really didn’t have the tools at that age to say I was having an existential crisis.
When I was a teenager, it dawned on me someone would die eventually, and i wondered how it would affect me. Would I go nuts like I did at seven? (My friends eventually took me back into the fray and we just put the bad guys in jail and as cowboys we roped and rode horses instead of killing Indians.) Would I be numb when the “real thing” happened?
My first funeral was for my fiancee’s grandfather. I never went into the viewing room and kept it together nicely. Having never met the man, it wasn’t too difficult. I was comforting to my fiancee and we got through it. I thought, “Wow, I’m a rock star! I only freak at pretend death!” A weight felt like it had been lifted off of my shoulders.
The next foray I made into a funeral home started with a phone call from my mother. “Jen, you have to go to Joy’s son’s funeral, because she was my best friend for 20 years and I can’t get there from Las Vegas.” I figure I can be an ambassador for the family, after all, I’m a rock star, right? My friend who vaguely remembered the guy from high school went with me.
I was not entirely prepared for the intensity a suicide funeral entails. I thought this would be a repeat of the distant, never-met grandfather’s funeral.
Thanks to her I got to experience my very first funeral “showboater” – my term for the person that just has NO RIGHT to fall apart all crazytown style at the funeral. She was sobbing louder than the guy’s wife, girlfriend, and mother combined. It was kind of embarrassing. Luckily (that’s sarcasm, be prepared) the mother of the deceased was so over-the-moon gone from the loss of her son, she thought I was my mother. So I got this amazing, completely undeserved, best friend treatment. She took me to the casket and showed me how the funeral makeup people did “such a good job fixing his head…you can’t even see where the bullet went in unless you look really close…”
What could I do? This mother’s grief was so overwhelming. I played along, answering to my mother’s name all night. After I got home I called mom and told her that if Joy called her she was to pretend she had been there, as I had discussed with the family. She did and all was well.
The difference with that one is that I knew the guy from high school. He was a stoner and I was a total nerd in high school, but we had a class together and remembered me and us playing together when we were young. That got me left alone by a large part of the H.S. population that probably would have made mincemeat out of my pegged jeans and one HyperColor sweatshirt that I wore into the ground two years too later to be cool.
I went home and remember being in an almost trance-like state. I looked at my great-grandmother and said, “It’s started.”
She, of course, asked me what the hell I was talking about.
“I’ve been though a lot, grams, but death has been kind enough not to come to my door. Now that someone I know is gone…it’s only going to get closer and closer and the next one is going to hurt so much.”
She looked at me like I’d gone insane. I felt like Cassandra, the Oracle no one believed.
The discussion ended there.
The next funeral I attended was for my ex-fiancee. I was told by his mother he had an undiagnosed heart condition and that’s what did him in. It was sad, and it hurt, but I was prepared for this one. I knew the people attending, I knew who they were, and only thought it was a little, tiny bit creepy they wanted me there early for the family viewing.
Until I walked in, sat in the back of the room on a comfy chair to get my mettle up to go check out the casket, and my ex-fiancees beautiful little nephew came running up in all his bright eyed, bushy tailed glory…looked me in the eyes with a quizzical cock of his head…and asked me, “How do you think it feels to hang yourself?”
Thankfully the friend that was with me (not the showboater from earlier) immediately sprang up and asked little Elmo (that’s what we called him) “I think I saw a frog out front, want to go see?” They ran off together and I was alone.
I also ended up giving four guys a complex during that funeral. It was so surreal. The eulogy was given by a friend from high school he hadn’t talked to in almost ten years and he got my name wrong. I laughed REALLY loud. Couldn’t help it. It was funny. He felt awful about it. Then three “friends” of my ex walked in together and (I’ve been told by multiple sources) I pointed at the group and said, “It should have been you.”
Two years later one of my friends had the cojones to ask who I meant, and I found out for two years they had been trying to figure out who I meant. I figured it couldn’t hurt to be honest, “I didn’t care. He was a better person than any or all of you.” Question answered.
Pretty traumatic, right? You all know I still blame myself. I mean, you would too if you were me. We were the on again, off again couple. Even if he was my ex…I never thought it would stay that way. Neither did he. It was just a thing, the being apart. But you can’t go back. You can’t fix dead. (Please don’t comment that it wasn’t my fault. I know it’s not, really, I promise. LOL I’ll say whatever you want to not have the conversation!)
So at two under-30 suicide funerals I figured I maybe, just maybe had paid my dues for holding off death-coping for the early part of my life.
Then my best friend died of cancer and I had to cope with that funeral. The dreams I had about it. I had horriffic dreams. For months. I don’t talk about it much. I was there the night she died. Not right next to her, but hours before, where I was able to tell her everything I wanted to. I never got that chance with the ex and it still haunts me. That last phone call where I wanted to say “I love you” but didn’t because I was embarrassed.
The next funeral I went to (so our tally now is one normal grampa funeral, two under-30 suicides and a cancer funeral on my best friend’s 25th birthday) was for a friend of a friend’s son. He was 16 months old and the funeral home had been set up like a nursery. The deceased was displayed in a crib with Veggie Tales posters on the walls and a television playing Veggie Tales not far away. The eulogy started with (here’s a shocker) the Veggie Tales theme song. We all sang along.
I still get queasy when I hear, “If you’d like to talk to tomatoes…if a squash can make you smile…”
At the end of the service the mother didn’t want to leave but didn’t want to hold the child…so the funeral director picked him up and rocked him in a rocking chair. She sang to him. Until she said, “We have to take him back now, he’s starting to get a little leaky…which is completely normal.”
I remember thinking, “There is nothing normal about any of this.” There is nothing normal about death, about funerals in general. Nothing normal at all.
The next funeral was a girl with much history. Both with my husband and most of my friends, including some history with me. She took a taxi to a gun range and, well, yeah. The girl was a compulsive liar and so was her mother, so a couple people came to my house to ask me to do what no one else could. Prove it. I called the gun range, told a story, and confirmed the incident did happen.
Her funeral went normally until the priest said, “She touched so many.” That’s where about five people did the snort-laugh that was quickly covered by much, MUCH coughing. No one wanted her dead, but that does not take away from the fact that the girl got AROUND. We all still feel appropriately guilty for laughing. I promise.
Last year on Halloween (do you see how there’s always a quirky “thing” attached?) was my favorite Gramma of Randy’s. I loved her. But I was fine. My heart hurt for Grampa K who loved her more than he loved himself. They had a great marriage up to the end.
That’s where the funeral stories end.
Most of my grief lives inside of me somewhere. I don’t look at it often. It’s in a box on a shelf in the back corner of my head. It’s dusty and has a few cobwebs on it and I do my best not to see it out of the corner of my eye if I have to go in the room for something else.
But funerals always jimmy the box open, because a little more has to go into the box. I can’t own the grief for other people’s grandparents – that’s for their family, not extended in-law family like me.
It’s one of the reasons I ended up passing on the wake tonight. I just…couldn’t take two days of death focus.
Want to know what’s quirky about this funeral? The mass is being held at the church I got married at, of course! Bricks for that church were laid in part by Randy’s grandmother’s husband. It was not only appropriate for us to get married there, it is appropriate for her funeral mass to be there.
That doesn’t mean it won’t be totally weird to walk down that aisle for the first time since I said, “I do” and listened to our priest talk about Mother Theresa taking babies out of dumpsters in Calcutta to die in her arms. (Yep that was during my wedding. Surreal is my middle name.)
I’ll probably cry. Death is not fun, nor is it pretty. Six seasons of Six Feet Under haven’t taken the sting away, nor has watching umpteen horror movies trying to become desensitized.
But there’s more than enough room in the box. Besides, as long as it’s someone else’s family … it’s not my grandmother and great-grandmother. Yeah, that’s my bottom line. Death is still leaving my family alone…for now…and I am wildly grateful every day death does not touch my immediate family.
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I’m so sorry to hear about all of this, Jen. This was a very eloquent post, which is hard to be on such a difficult subject. My thoughts are with you and your family right now. I hope the healing comes fast and easy.
Interesting you wrote this post today and I am reading it right now. I am on the way out the door right now to go be with my good friend whose mother just passed away unexpectedly.
Death is a weird thing. We’ve both had our fair share of suicides a little too close to home which is one of the more difficult griefs to shake due to all the guilt associated with the death but whatever you know all that…
Just wanted to say I’m thinking of you and thanks for your timely post.