furnerals are long, tedious and full of grief. they’re an endless procession of procedure, of hearses and caskets and priests and pallbearers and weeping and flowers and goodbye.
there’s a fountain of ritual after dying and before burying. i could not imagine burying my father. someone asked him if he wanted anything.
I want my father, he said, a little boy again, lost in the woods or a department store or somewhere where he thought he could find his way back and now realized he couldn’t. he was suddenly small, not frail, but small and burdened and his clothes too big for him.
at the wake, during the day and the evening, it all seemed easier. my grandmother wept, bursting with each new arrival. my uncles stood around the casket with sunglasses, guarding it. the casket itself was beautiful, a rich and deep red mohagany with easy curves and sharp lines. people came, some well dressed, some out for lunch. in the evening it was all black and sorrow. you could walk right up against it, feel it press itself on your chest, almost not give way. i was in and out, my grandfather’s corpse was ice, my daughter played outside, picking flowers.
the actual service was even more difficult, my aunt could not stand, my grandfather’s sons wept, my grandmother told my grandfather to look, that we all were all here, to come back, look Yianni, we’re here, we’re here, come home, how could you leave me?
we were a procession of twenty cars snaking through island park, oceanside, east rockaway. we drove past his house one last time before leaving for the cemetery.
in pinelawn, competing cemeteries have acres, lush and thick, the size of golf courses. along the shoulders and inbetween them are stores selling tombstones one atop of the other, like vegetable trucks. dull and grey and somber, you can almost sense the near hysterical need to throw out some color.
no one walks the sidewalks.
at the burial we were exhausted. we said good bye at the wake, we said good bye at the church, we were saying goodbye here. we were spent, resigned, submissive. we do not actually watch the casket be put into the ground. and then we were done. and as we all made our way back to our cars and drove one by one away, the funeral director stood alone by the casket of my grandfather. he stood there, watching us leave, waiting. he did not wave, he didn’t even move. he stood there even when we were all gone.