I’m a pallbearer at her funeral. They told me not to do it. They told me that it wasn’t the best thing. I came close to hitting one of them. He didn’t mean any harm, I know that now. But when he put his arm around my shoulders and tried to explain it all to me, I think he knew. He stepped back and talked slower. You can tell. You can tell when they know that they don’t have a chance. If you really wanted to. I might not be as sharp as they are, with their visiting dignitaries and New York Times, but he stopped talking. “Maybe I’m wrong..” he had said.
I knew the priest, said my name and nodded his head, but didn’t say anything to me. Or maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. They had her casket open and when I went to pay the last respects I whispered to her: c’mon, stop this, wake up, your mother’s crying. I said more and they wouldn’t even look in my direction when I walked off. Her father looked embarrassed, as always when I was around. Her mother though, cried a bit heavier. She was the one that didn’t really mind me, I guess for the sake of keeping some sort of contact with her daughter. “I was young too..”, she’d say about us. One time she let me listen in on a conversation with her father. “I want you to know everyone is full of shit” she had said and that time he was saying, “You’re doing this to embarrass us, aren’t you..” It wasn’t like a question, more like an accusation. She’d say, “Fuck you dad” and laugh and not hang up the phone. Like I’d expect her to and he’d just sigh and say something like, “Very well..”
You should see some of them, so well dressed and grim. It’s not real. Only that coffin and the dead thing. That used to be her. That has me convinced that it’s still her even though she’s not breathing anymore. In that slow way that had me wonder sometimes at night how someone could breathe like that, so still. Then I see Seline come up to the coffin and I wish I didn’t have to hold back. Seline was the one that always insisted on cooking the stuff up. Always wanted a taste of everybody else’s even though she was the one that could afford it the most. Crying and almost falling onto the coffin. They had to help Seline back to the pews. Right in front of me, wailing. “I’m sick of it” she had said when I found her that night when the animal in front of me wouldn’t come with us to the hospital. She was sitting out on the balcony and throwing up over the rail. Her face was old and puffy, “I’m jus fuckin sick of this shit.” And Seline didn’t want to be bothered, the end of a hose between her teeth. “Ffug off muhn, cheesus kraheesst.”