What to Do

C.S. Her thighs are the size of my chest.

I actually think she’s cute, and if I were a foot and a half taller, I’d ask her out.

***

Some of us carry our pain as we would babies. We clutch them tight to our breast, hold on dearly, and shy away from showing them to the world. You raise a child in this manner, you get Buster from Arrested Development.

I hold my pain in like that. It’s the barbed bauble that I possess. For the past week, I’ve not wanted to talk about my aunt’s death. Indeed, for the past month, I’ve not wanted to discuss the inevitability of my aunt’s death. And now, here we are. Forgive me this indulgence, painful though it be.

Last Friday, after work, I drove to my aunt’s apartment to visit. This I had done for the past few weeks. She’d had the lung cancer for years now, but about a month ago, that was near the end. It was a wonder she lasted as long as she did.

To try and deal with it, I said my goodbyes each Friday, and hoped she’d pass on, move out of her pain. Each week brought me back to say goodbye yet again. It wore on me after a while, trying to think of her as dead, to prepare myself. It didn’t work so well.

From week to week, it was hardly fair to watch her pass from consciousness to unconsciousness to barely even living. She’d gone a month without eating, so destroyed were her insides.

Last Friday, my mom told me it was almost the end. The same thing she’d told me the past few weeks. I didn’t believe it, but I still went. God damn me for being so callous at that point, but I don’t deal well with life. Or death.

What struck me, what struck me every time, was how small she was under the blanket. Like a ten year old almost. So frail beneath her cover. Wired up with a breathing tube. With a catheter. With an intravenous tube. Tubes everywhere.

A few weeks previous, her final words to me were, the next time we meet, it will be in heaven. It wasn’t as I had to keep seeing her, but it was the last thing she said to me.

We sat down to eat. Everyone believed she would last until Saturday or Sunday, based on how she was doing. I had a mouthful of brown rice in my mouth, and was chewing on it, when J.Y. came out and told us she had passed on. Died, let’s try to keep the euphemisms to a minimum.

That mouthful of rice was like dirt in my mouth. I was stunned, which is probably why I kept chewing on it, finally managing to choke it down. Worse than the first time I had raisin bran when I was four and thought I’d die if I had to eat any more of that mushy slop.

At this point, my mom told me to clear the table of all the dinner. What the hell else could I do? Someone had to do it, and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just gathered up all the dishes, washed them, put them on the dish rack. Left them to dry. I wonder if, when they clean the apartment out, they’ll find the dishes clean and dry, and if they’ll donate them, throw them out, keep them, what.

The family converged. Everyone went straight for my aunt’s bedroom. I couldn’t really stay in there, still stuck in heavy denial, so I sat in the living room, waiting for people to come, opening the door when they did, waiting for the front buzzer to ring. Little did I know someone had propped the front door open, so my waiting was for naught. But still, still I waited, because I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what the hell to do.

We were distraught. My aunt was the matriarch on my dad’s side of the family. For the most part, people were stunned. The notable exception was R.Y. He wanted to go watch Doom afterwards. I said I’d go with him, because he wasn’t then grieving (he’d already grieved as she started losing her consciousness). I guess I wanted to be somewhere else. However, I wouldn’t leave until after they removed her corpus.

The funeral home representatives came in with a gurney, and removed her body, just as you would see at a crime scene.

Nothing happened of note Saturday.

Sunday was the funeral. Life goes on.

As usual, my parents (my mom) likes being early, so we arrived about an hour and a half early at the funeral home. I was the first one inside, and as far as I can tell, I was the first family member to see the body in the open casket.

There were bouquets and flowers everywhere, all with names on ribbons in Chinese. I couldn’t read most of them, but later, my mom did point out my name on one of the ribbons. How nice.

She looked so beautiful, so at peace. So alive.

It didn’t feel right. No, it didn’t feel real. I was still denying what was going on, and kept thinking she was sleeping, resting, something, anything. I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know what to do.

In some ways, pre-funeral was worse than actual funeral. As the family came in, set up pictures, organized everything, people dealt in their own way. This generally meant breaking down crying at the casket, or breaking down crying in the bathroom, or in my case, staring blankly at the flowers and not knowing what to do.

I don’t remember most of the funeral. What I do remember is the opera singer, as she sang at the beginning. I thought she was horrendous, all pitchy and offkey. Turned out she sings at the Kennedy Center, so what do I know?

Then the preacher started giving his eulogy in Chinese. Damned if he wasn’t straight up deep-South-Hellfire-and-Brimstone passion and fury, based solely on his intonation. Based on his words, from what I could understand, he wasn’t nearly that angry, but he sort of was. And it turned out he used to be a DuPont chemist. Go figure.

At some point I was handed a pair of gloves and told I was a pallbearer, just like my uncle’s funeral (this aunt’s husband). The casket had a hinged handle, which made carrying easy. Nice of the casket makers to think ahead.

We drove down to the cemetery. It was a beautiful day, the one break in a weekend full of rain and hurt. Well, one of two isn’t bad.

We carried the casket to the grave, positioned it on the lowering system. My uncle was buried first, twelve feet deep, and my aunt would be buried six feet deep on the same plot.

There was a nice green tent above the grave, and green carpeting all around, green felt chairs set up before the grave. The flowers were beside the casket, in a large pile, and one of the funeral home employees handed out single flowers to the family. I took a yellow rose, dethorned of course (as if we would feel the thorns. I couldn’t feel anything in my hands.). It smelled light, sweet, like a rose ought to smell. And then I looked up at the casket, sitting there on the suspension. Like lightning, it hit me. I knew what to do.

I started crying. Bawling. Couldn’t deny it any longer. My aunt was dead.

They lowered the casket, and I walked up, rose in hand. Time didn’t slow down like the movies, probably because it wasn’t a period of high stress. My feet fell fast, one after the other, and when I peeped down over the edge, barely able to look at the flowers and that casket, lowered down down down, I lost it again. Everything blurred as tears welled in my eyes, as if I was staring up into a heavy rain. I almost tripped walking away.

After, we went to grab dinner, gorged ourselves on way too much food as if there had just been a marriage. The kids had their own table, and we were content to relive the past, not really discussing our aunt. And it helped.

And now, here I am, reliving it, accepting what I haven’t wanted to, what I’ve still been slightly denying, even though I watched that coffin lower, watched as the cemetery workmen in their dirty khakis and dirty hats removed their wooden blocks and manually lowered the casket. My aunt is dead.

Rest in peace C.Y.