People I didn't recognize came in out of the damp fog. In my cloud of social anxiety, I was just barely conscious of my awareness that most of them in my generation were overweight and obviously colored their hair. And they all looked so old. What happened to us? Dave was only 61; that seems so young to me. It occurred to me as I was standing awkwardly trying to keep an appropriately sad but welcoming look on my face, that I probably looked just as old and decrepit to them as they did to me. WTF.
I realized that some of the strangers were actually grownup children of my cousins, towing their own young daughters and sons. Some of the faces I may have seen once at a barbecue a few years back, at my aunt's 75th birthday. Seems like ancient history now. My memory fails me daily. Names and faces... like my mother, I am learning to fake it.
The funeral home assistant, a tall heavy young woman dressed in a parka and black leggings, perked up as soon as Cousin Dave's wife arrived. I could see her move into a brisk-but-sympathetic let's-get-this-show-on-the-road mode. I tried to model my face after her expression. Nobody noticed.
“If you want to drive your car to the site, just follow the truck.” She didn't have to say which truck. We all knew: The truck with the casket hanging out the back. I can only imagine what it was like to drive that truck from the house to the cemetery. Did they hang a festive red flag on the end of the casket? Would any nearby drivers realize that there was an embalmed body, sans a few organs, resting in the box? Now there's a plot for a story...
Someone murmured something about walking. That sounded good to me, and apparently to many others. We swarmed out the door into the drippy fog and walked in small groups out to the parking lot. My aunt came over, a tiny shred of an old woman wearing an eye-watering hot fuchsia windbreaker. I think my mother might actually have a pound or two over my aunt. (My aunt has always competed to be thinnest.)
She gave me a long, uncomfortable hug. Her eyebrows barely reached my chest. I'm not sure where she was looking—at my jacket, I guess. I stared off across the parking lot, patting her back, realizing belatedly that I was actually holding her up. I waited for her weight to transfer back onto her tiny feet and extricated myself from her embrace.
An exotic long-haired young woman came over and gave me a hug. Who...?
“I'm Julie,” she said in a choked voice. Oh, right. Julie. My brain scrambled, trying to unravel the family tree on the spot. Dave's second daughter. Oh, right. She just lost her father. Bummer.
My brother and his girlfriend were there, two familiar faces. The small crowd walked in groups up a small rise. As we crested the hill, a cold wind attacked. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the typical 40° damp wind we all know as Portland winter. We all huddled into our scarves and trudged onward.
Not far along the road was the mausoleum wall. About 20 yards below the road, a backhoe and a little pickup filled with gravel were parked on the muddy grass. An empty bier stood waiting for the casket. I presumed the bier hid the open grave beneath. Hey, I've seen funerals on TV, I know what's what. Pretty soon, six men of varying ages struggled into view, carrying the wooden casket across the slippery grass. I recognized Dave's two brothers and Dave's son. I thought of all the things that could go wrong, but they settled the box on the bier without mishap.
I hovered on the periphery as about 30 people clustered around, facing a bearded guy wearing black and holding a book. Minister, pastor? Four members of the grounds crew waited respectfully nearby. One was a blond woman wearing enormous black gloves. I imagined they were itching to get back to backhoeing and spreading gravel.
As if on cue, as the minister led the crowd in the first of several prayers, the fog began to lift. The view was impressive. Far across the valley, sunlit glimmered on a section of the Willamette River. Dave's other daughter stood up to make some brief remarks. Fifteen minutes later, the wind was cutting through my jacket. Small children were crying out loud, the adults were sniffling into tissues, partly from grief, partly from the biting wind, and I was ready to bail.
After another prayer, a young girl stood by the box and faced the assembled group to sing an a capella hymn. The first stanza had everyone moaning and sobbing. So cute! So sweet. By the third stanza, people were starting to shift around in the mud and pull their scarves around their necks. By the fifth stanza, she was still going strong. Where's Monty Python when you need him? I gazed off over the open fields of the cemetery below, inching away from the mourners (prayer and hymns have that effect on me), and watched a crow fight off a hawk over our heads. The hawk kept circling, aloft on the wind, and lazily drifted away toward some distant trees. The crow returned to a tree near the mausoleum, the winner, for now.
The story should end here for effect, but life is so strange. The grounds crew lifted a white plastic cover and placed it over the casket. Unfortunately, the cover did not fit over the box. My youngest cousin, Dave's younger brother, had built the box himself with the assistance of Dave's son. He was standing next to me as we watched the dilemma unfold.
“Twenty-four inches tall and twenty-eight inches wide,” my cousin said. “That's what they told me. It better fit.”
People milled around for a few minutes, churning up the grass, then most retired to the shelter of the mausoleum wall, where the cemetery people had set up two rows of folding chairs covered in dark green fake fur (I kid you not). The cousins and sibling gathered in groups according to their age brackets, waiting for the cemetery crew to find a cover that would fit. I wandered a dozen yards away to see the grave marker for my grandparents, who both died in 1985. My girl cousin came over with her daughter.
“When Grandpa came to stay with my mother, after Grandma died, he was so sad,” my cousin said, glaring bleakly at her twig of a mother who was holding court by the mausoleum wall. “My mother had no compassion at all for him and what he was going through.”
She looked at me. “You know my mother.”
“I do know your mother,” I agreed. I thought about mothers. I decided that even as much as I'm struggling with my own mother, I would not want to trade. I know her mother.
The wind felt like it was coming straight off the ocean. At that point, I hit my limit. I didn't know I had a limit on graveside services, but apparently I do. I decided I didn't need to see my cousin's coffin lowered into the dirt. I said goodbye to my girl cousin and her daughter, and to my brother and headed away from the group to get up to the road. The grass in places was pure mud, which made walking treacherous. My brother's wife walked back to the parking lot with me. The hem of her long dress was wet from trailing in sodden grass. We talked about aging parents, but didn't figure anything out.
