Irrelephant

And we're down to two.

God, I hate funerals. There just so...boring.

I’m sitting in the back row, furthest from the mourners, folding origami and thinking about what I was going to have for dinner. Maybe mashed potatoes?

My father is greeting the guests who arrive in a continuous flow, the ones who have come to pay their useless respects to my mother who is long gone. They didn’t even know her that well, I think, and they all ignore me, completely oblivious to the fact that I’m the deceased’s daughter.

“I think I got the instructions wrong.”

I turn, finding my godsister and best friend Bethany staring at her lopsided crane that falls over pathetically every time she tries to straighten it. I can’t help but laugh.

“You missed a step,” I tell her helpfully and she rolls her eyes.

“No duh, Sherlock,” she says and Uncle Kane glances over, amusement lighting his eyes as he picks up a piece of the square paper.

“Patience is key,” he tells us, fingers deftly folding the delicate, crisp square until it resembled the picture in the manual, “Voila.”

“That is so not fair,” Bethany grumbles and he smiles.

“Practice helps,” he says and we laugh, catching the attention of those in attendance. They give us dirty looks but I stare right back, challenging them to confront me.

Expletives bubble to my lips but Bethany stops me by handing me another paper.

“Fold,” she orders, “We’re so not giving up.”

I exhale on a sigh and bend my head, my concentration broken a few times by those who abruptly realize who I am. The actual service begins when the minister, an old family friend, goes up next to the casket like it was the pulpit.

And as he begins to spout spiritual affirmations, I realize that I’ve stopped believing in them, stopped believing in God a long time ago. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe He existed, it was that He just didn’t give a shit. We had to make our own way in the world, not with some higher power guiding us. Two years of flitting from hopefulness to hopelessness that taught me that it didn’t matter what you did. The prayers were just illusions, drugs to feed our need to feel like someone was listening.

We skip the eulogy part (I learned later that we had done the whole funeral ‘wrong’, whatever that means) and then its time for the cremation. The funeral director and his associates come in and drill the casket lid shut as we, the living people, line ourselves up in two orderly rows.

It was supposed to be an open coffin event, but my father had closed it when one of my mother’s closest friends burst into tears when she saw how frail my mother had become. He hadn’t wanted me to remember her as a shrivelled husk of who she had been, but to remember her as the woman in the pictures, long before the cancer had robbed her of everything that defined her. I roll my eyes with impatience as I hear someone sniffle behind me and recall what I’d heard over the course of the wake.

But that’s the thing with death, isn’t it? It tends to make people stupid and trip over themselves in their misguided attempts at providing some sort of comfort.

I’d had someone ask me if I thought my mother would still be alive if she had gone for the conventional treatment of chemotherapy and stuff. Tempted to out them as idiots, Uncle Kane had quickly deflected the potential disaster, steering the conversation to more neutral topics, like how my mother had died peacefully, so that was a blessing.

No, I wanted to argue, she didn’t die peacefully.

She died in pain, alone and in the midst of soiling herself. She had lost every shred of dignity at her last breath and there was nothing to talk about. Period.

Funerals weren’t for the dead, they were for the living who had nothing else better to do. If you wanted to honour someone, you should have done it when they were alive.

Bethany holds the umbrella over us as we follow the procession to the crematorium, on a hill a couple of blocks away from the parlour. Uncle Kane stays beside us in the blazing sun, keeping up light conversation as I’m eager to get this over with, perhaps more so than the others and I wonder why.

What was that I learned, the stages of grief?

Bull. Shit.

We stand in silence as the pallbearers roll the casket onto the contraption that reminds me of a gurney and slid it into the board that would carry my mother’s corpse into the fiery embrace of the furnace. Those in attendance place a single white rose on the lid and we gather around with my father and I at the helm, as a crematorium employee presses a button and the coffin is carried away to its final destination.

There is a sudden sense of sadness that washes through me as the doors of the furnace closes like gaping mouth and I blink back the tears that burn my eyes. I grab Bethany’s arm and she places her head on my shoulder. Uncle Kane watches stoically, his lips moving as he soundlessly offers his prayers of peace of his sister’s soul.

We trek back down the parlour to get our things and I look up at the sky, seeing the black smoke from the chimney’s up on the hill. Exhaustion grips me and I turn to see my father doing the same. He has that forlorn look in his eyes and he offers me a small smile when he catches me staring at him. He reaches over and kisses my cheek as people start to offer their last condolences.

I wonder how life is going to be now. We’ve always been a private family, depending on one another for company, even more so on my mother who acted as a buffer between my father and I. I used to call us the ‘three-man’ army, the ones who could survive on our own.

But now she’s dead and we’re down to two.