Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter Two

It wasn't so much that she pushed her cleavage up to her nose, though she did. It was more that her cleavage was just so incredibly wrinkly. It was fascinating that she displayed it so proudly, thick with foundation to enhance the curves. And yet there she was, somber black dress cut low so her 80-year-old bosom was presented for everyone to admire, foundation emphasizing nothing but the deep crags in her skin, her equally old and wrinkly husband pushing his gut out possessively next to her.

This is what I'm thinking about at the funeral of the man I was going to spend my life with. My great-aunt Rhona's boobs. To be fair, it was hard to ignore the travesty of her ancient cleavage. I caught all the men peeking glances at it from under their furrowed brows, and half the women too. But then, it wasn't their fiancé being shoveled into the ground four months before his wedding. Shouldn't I be contemplating life without him, or at least whether he was going to a jolly God in the sky or simply disintegrating into the dust around him? Maybe I'm not even supposed to be thinking at all; I should be so busy crying I can't even breathe, let alone think. I looked around, guilty, wondering if anyone could tell what I was thinking about, wondering what I should be thinking about instead.

There weren't too many people to look at. The media, in their ever-repugnant frenzy for catchy headlines and dramatic speculation, had caught on that one of the victims was of Iranian origin, and that his fiancée had been visited by the police on the night of the bombing. For that juicy bit of gossip, I blamed my nosey neighbor Rose. Every apartment building has their own yenta, and Rose was particularly dedicated to her profession. So the media had built up entire castles from those two facts, and now only Al's closest friends and family were attending his funeral, along with my extended family, none of whom had ever been able to resist a good group tragedy.

Not a single friend of mine was here. That morning I had woken up to an alarm on my phone, set to remind me that it was Vicki's wedding today. The fact that I had forgotten her wedding was unsurprising—she had been a peripheral friend of mine, and Al and I had agreed to show up late to the party and leave early. It was more surprising that I had lost track of the day of the week and it was Sunday, something of a shock to my system. I normally counted down the days until the weekend. Now everything was a blur.

That my friends chose to be at Vicki's wedding over my fiancé's funeral stung. We'd spent hours collectively dreading her wedding, trying to think up reasons not to go. And now the perfect excuse was handed to them and they were too easily swayed by public opinion to use it.

Not that I really wanted them to be here. I didn't want to deal with anything right now, especially not the curiosity-driven sympathy of my friends; if they believed the media then I certainly didn't want them here, not to get out of Vicki's wedding or for any other reason. But for Al's sake, I wish more people had come. He didn't deserve that treatment. He deserved their faith and their love. The man was a schoolteacher, for God's sake. You can't get more gentle and caring, less terroristy, than that. But I was trying, deeply and verily, to avoid thinking about that, about all the things about Al that were suddenly gone from my life. I tried to feed myself platitudes about knowing who your real friends are and other shit that really helped not a whit.

The pastor or father or whoever it was Susan had managed to dig up—poor choice of words, I realized too late—was reciting platitudes and biblical phrases that I recognized from my brief and ill-fated stint in Hebrew school. The man had obviously never met Al. I hoped the journalists in the crowd—dressed in deep black, clearly hoping to mingle with the mourners and avoid observation, standing out only because so few people had actually showed up—saw the irony in a Christian eulogizer leading the funeral of a man they hoped to paint as a radical Muslim. I felt obligated to listen, but his monotonous tone and weak use of English made it clear why he was available on such short notice. So I went back to people-watching from the sidelines of my own fiancé's funeral, a bystander, through my mental fog and general heaviness, to my own tragedy.