The Funerals
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<Graphic Content WARNING>
“One, two, three o’clock…”
The blue coocoo clock ejected its tiny inhabitant as I began to sing the moment the first hand stood straight up.
“Four o’clock ROCK! Five, six, seven o’clock…” I bounced from one twin mattress to the other and back again until flopping down in the giggles of the finale “Rock…. around… the clock TONIGHT!!”. My great-grandfather’s eyes followed in a mix of bemusement and reserved hopeless terror at my daredevil antics. There wasn’t much he could do to stop me until his daughter popped her head through the door. My Grandma had been sewing down the hallway in the room full of other adventures. I’d burrow into what still feels like mountains of cloth and fresh laundry to peek out at her hunched over the machine.
The Polaroid I have of me squirming and smiling next to Great-Grampy is full of life in his eyes. There’s a good chance he was my first best-friend in my first years that were his last. I don’t recall him being ill, just being there then gone. After he died, without an audience and protector, I left the coocoo bird to sing on its own, echoing off of the broken plaster walls of our family home above the store he and Grandma had run together. There was another house down the way she still owned from her divorce, but home was where we could care for each other together. It was a place safe from the decisions of my mother.
I understood what it meant about heaven when he died but I didn’t understand standing at the same family plot a month later. Staring up to the clouds and back at my mother, I asked why we were here again so soon. She stood to the right of me as I turned my body away and memorized the geography of the hill and tree line; it would direct me back to this ley line two decades later. In utter confusion, I asked Great Grandpa to look after Grandma up there as I couldn’t hear her, yet. They said she was in the box being lowered next to his grave’s mound of a grassless silhouette.
Twenty years later my first migraine was triggered by scanning page after page of microfiche for clues on where to find them, again. Reconnecting with my first foster mother and half-brother brought me back to the state I was born. That first foster mother adopted the first brother. Within the browned film I found Grandma’s obituary. I later found that her funeral home was still in operation and made the call. The owner was close to retirement, but remembered the services that went unpaid. “No, no…” he waved off my offer to cover the cost. While the State could not find the death certificate after years of my trying, he sent me his original a few weeks after our chat.
My mother had identified Grandma’s body which failed to continue living through blunt force trauma.
My mother left the final rites unpaid.
My mother, that held my hand while unable to explain the unexplainable did so knowing it was her actions that resulted in the Missing Person’s report. The body found at the bottom of a coal mine nearly two weeks after I was told Grandma was sick with a headache... Sick while rotting in my bed in the heat of the trailer at the very end of summer. Then, she was “alive”. Now, at the cemetery, she is really dead, but how is she dead if she was motionlessly alive in my bed?
The idea of sleep became an equally confusing and terrifying part of childhood. For years, I’d cry and freak out when being sent to take a nap during the day. What if I never woke up, like her? Like my Great Grandpa? I wasn’t ready to go, too. Stephen King couldn’t keep up with my level of night terrors.
When I stood on the ley line as my adult self that led me to the marble engraved with their names, it all made sense why it never made sense. With the hand that held my mother’s hand, I placed a stone atop each headstone. I placed all the apologies they never heard for all of the years they were left here abandoned on the hill. My half-bro and I cleaned off layer upon layer of lichen…
With the hand that held my mother’s hand, I called the life insurance company another ten years later. after another deep dive into all that went unresolved. The was such awkwardness as the agent apologized for my loss thirty years beyond when that call should have been made and was left to me. There isn’t much left beyond our mother’s Bonnie and Clyde spending spree, with the exception of the pension my grandmother’s employer petitioned to be given to us 2 grandchildren. I used the money to pay for my first apartment when my second foster mother left me homeless the summer of my second year of college. I spent it on food, a bicycle to get to work, and a blue sundress I still wear. it’s still incomprehensible how she who was supposed to protect me held my hand and lied and lied and lied as if none of it happened in front of my face. As if I wasn’t tucking in my dollies with their heads wrapped like Grandma’s. Grandma’s- when I’d sneak into my room and plead with her to wake up. As if blood and maggots didn’t send me into a panicked rage. She lied that she was safety as she held my hand…