Well, Sh*t: a true story of Cancer, Prayer, and Emotional Shrapnel

A Class Discussion on Funerals

[.For Bill Jolliff.]

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George Fox University, 2011

...

DEATH, the Professor wrote on the dry erase board in thick black marker.

He stood at the front of the classroom, ignoring his notes, poised with one finger over the word. He always pointed with his middle or ring finger, which I found endearing.

"She wrote about death," Professor Jolliff said, "Because she was familiar with it. Death had taken so many from her. Now, most of you are young and have little experience with death. Maybe a grandparent has died, but statistically, you all still have your parents, friends, even the family pets. You won't start losing most of them until you're a little older. How many funerals have you been to?"

"Two," said one of the boys in the front.

I began counting funerals on my fingers.

"Anyone else?" the professor continued.

"I've been to three," said the girl down my row.

Everyone nodded, solemnly. Three was an accomplishment.

"Anyone been to more than three?" asked the professor.

"No," mumbled most of the room.

"Yes," I said.

"How many?"

"I'm still counting."

His eyes softened slightly and he looked down at me, his mouth pursed shut behind his generous beard. The names were in my head, the list on my extended fingertips. Nine fingers.

"Nine," I said.

There was a silence in the room and suddenly I felt very embarrassed by the expressions of my classmates. It was as if I had planned it this way, the calculated move of a literary whore, pretending I didn't know why they were all staring at me with wide eyes.

As if they were annoyed by all my funerals, and more so annoyed by my innocent realization that I had more than everyone else.

The silence itself was a cliche from a young adult novel. Three steps from a love-triangle and two steps left of I'm not like other girls.

But it was the truth. I had experienced more death than the others, so what? I would experience even more in my near future, and I didn't know it yet. It seemed like nearly every year of my life would be marked by the absence of someone else. The proof was in the caskets. Nine funerals before I was twenty-two, and it would be ten soon enough.

But for now, nine.

My classmates were just that. They weren't friends, they were peers. They didn't know me. They were giving me a look that said you're a freak in a subtle, hipster sort of way. Gentle expressions in the eyes, as if they could empathize, but the mouths were judgmental. The eyebrows had risen past class discussion and furrowed into please, stop standing on your special little pedestal. It's not earning you points with the professor. Like any other poet, I absolutely wished for Bill Jolliff's special approval. But I didn't actually attend services for dead people with the intention of making myself look worldly and experienced in his eyes. But how could a group of young yuppies understand that?

But the problem was, I thought everyone had been to plenty of funerals. I was as surprised by their lack as they were surprised by my abundance of it.

Funerals were a staple event of my upbringing. When I think of my childhood, memories are taken up with funerals. When people still wore all black in memorium. I used to wear black Mary Janes. Half of my classmates probably don't know a Mary Jane was a buckled shoe before it was another word for marijuana, I think to myself, perhaps unjustly.