Chronicles Revealed

Chapter 7: Funeral for A Son

We left after midnight in the last night of the wake to rest somehow and prepare for his funeral and burial. We were in that frame of mind when you feel very tired and sleepy but you can't sleep at all because there are a million things spinning in your head and your heart feels so heavy and empty at the same time. You are in some sort of stupor and you don't know exactly what to do.

We found ourselves just letting the night lapse into day without doing anything but talking of everything and nothing, commenting on this and that, moving around the house listlessly like zombies with nowhere to go, watching the TV without really seeing anything, drinking coffee, eating something, even cleaning the car at three in the morning. Before we knew it daylight was coming out of the sky, bit by bit by bit, until it enfolded the whole world around us. It was going to be a day full of sunshine and white clouds and not a sign of rain. What a beautiful day it was going to be in a world of pain and misery.

We left the house early. We were all in our white funeral attire already. There were things to do at the funeral home. We had to clean up the chapel without sweeping, just picked up the scraps and trash on the floor and put them in the trash bag. We arranged the sofas and tables, too, as we found them in the first day of the wake. We made sure that we didn't leave anything behind that belonged to us.

With so many hands helping, the cleaning and re-arranging were so quickly accomplished. We didn't really have to do those things but it doesn't hurt to leave a good impression. On the other hand, Mama went to the office of the funeral home and settled all our bills. When we left there was nothing much the janitor would do but mop the exposed floors and the chapel would be ready for the family that had been waiting to take our place. We knew how it felt to wait in a funeral house.

At nine 0'clock in the morning, the funeral home personnel brought out the coffin of our son on its bier, wheeled it to the funeral car waiting right at the entrance, feet first. Some of the flowers were placed in the car and the rest were loaded in a truck for transport to the memorial park where our son would be laid to his final rest. There were So many flowers that went with my son. The crucifix wreath remained on top of the coffin.

I accompanied my son traveling on his bier in his coffin until he was placed inside the car. There was no hurry. Everything was done in a very professional manner. I looked back and I saw again people weeping and mourning in the valley of tears. I did not turn into a pillar of salt because, I guess, it was not to look back at sin but in the hope of seeing a magnificent white light rising behind me. What I saw were the new occupants going in and out of the chapel where my son laid for five days.

We had a motorcade from the funeral home to my son's next to the last stop. There was not much traffic, being a Sunday and we arrived at the monatery church before his scheduled requiem mass at ten in the morning. There was no mass anymore and they brought in my son's coffin. The cloistered nuns of the church had requested that we had him brought up to where they sing during a mass so they could see him one last time and we gladly obliged. The congregation, to this day, has a long and profound history with my wife's family and the touching request of the nuns was more than a pleasure for us to honor in the spirit of kinship and deeply rooted affinity.

They viewed him for sometime. They knew our son very well. Some of them saw him grow up and would recall seeing him running around with his brothers and cousins in the church grounds on several occasions, particularly on Sundays. They were visibly saddened by the loss of one so young and knew so well. After the viewing, the coffin on the bier was then brought down and placed in the middle aisle during the mass. The same priest held the requiem mass for my son. We dispensed with the eulogies since we felt it would just be like adding salt to an open wound. After the mass, we had the holy water blessing of the priest together with our son in his coffin and the final viewing of him in the church.