Funeral

“Just a warning,” my sister caught my attention with her hand gesturing, “it is open casket and he is right there.” The older of her two boys whispered to her and she nodded in agreement while leading them up to our grandfather. I turned to my father who was being badgered by his wife to stop hesitating at the threshold. He started and stopped a few times with inner turmoil. He is the oldest and had a troubled relationship with his father. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through. His father was a cold, short tempered man. My father was almost a foot taller than him but my grandfather was a champion boxer. He was a Marine. He was a navigator in World War II. He made up for his height with his fists and fury. After my parents got married, my father moved out of his parent’s home and across several states. It was as much an obvious distance as a figurative one. I put my hand on his back and he looked down to me. I gave a half reassuring smile and he moved through the doorway as if it was the first attempt. My son joined his cousins in hands and walked up to the open casket with ease. He was just happy to be part of their group. I stood behind my son and took a breath to hold it all in. I answered his questions softly while reiterating the ultimatum; great grandpa was dead and we were all here to say goodbye.

I hugged my cousin and reminisced about the last time we saw each other. He was a toddler, about my son’s age then. He was still in diapers, I recalled. He lives with my grandmother and is the youngest of all the cousins. I asked how he was really doing. He spoke with clarity. “I’m okay if she’s okay,’ he nodded to our grandmother at his left, “I’ll worry about me later, ya know?” I nodded in agreement. “I will be alright for her but if she is okay, everything is alright. I'll be alright. I’ll deal with me later, ya know?” I thought of my oldest sister who asks, “Ya know?” constantly when she drinks too much. I knew exactly what he meant. He had put it so simply but we all felt it. It is part of our heritage. Something that our genes latched onto for centuries just like our cold steel eyes. Stubborn, stoic, and charming blue eyes with a temper that is easily the scariest in the room. 

A cousin caught my eye and waltzed over. We embraced and he remarked on my newborn daughter, happily squirming in the crook of my right arm. We were in middle school the last I saw him. He told my husband, “Ya know, we are only one year apart,” with a thick New England accent. They introduced themselves to each other with equal gusto saying their names at the same time. The same name. When I asked him what he was up to these days, he answered swiftly, bragging about his profession in a bank and went on to elaborate on his appetite for beer and women. He looked exactly like you would think he does. I almost could have said it at the same time, just like he had done with my husband. He wondered off without asking what we were up to; being married, settling down, and having babies is obvious. 

Another cousin’s wife remarked on her young son, left at home for the occasion, and his tendency to climb. We laughed and traded daredevil stories of our two boys who share the family resemblance as well as the family spunk. She spoke with hope in her heart that I understood the pain she felt as her son graces the edge of safety with the terror in her voice as she wonders if the lust for bumps would ever subside. I assured her that it does dissipate as he gets older. He will peak soon enough and eventually mellow out and may be a sweet little boy, just as his father did. Her sister in law, my cousin, was listening to my older sister speak with her hands flying around to emphasize her words. I half listened to her response, her shrill voice came back to me when she was a teenager calling to her youngest brother to stop doing whatever it was that set her off. The two women look so much like our grandmother in height and build. 

I smiled at the resemblance and in remembering those four cousins and their dynamics. The two older sisters are close to my sister and I in age. The two boys are a few years younger. The youngest was a wild child, swearing as we giggled, and getting himself into trouble by being rambunctious for the laughs and attention. At the funeral I sat next to him in a short row. I asked him if he minded sitting near a couple of loud kids, smiling to assure him it was a farce. He was a younger version of his father. Bushy, curly hair and a big wiry beard to match. His face jolly, his eyes were big, round, and gentle; almost like a frog. They sparkled and he smiled with his whole face, “No worries, I’m used to it.” His niece mere seconds later, slid under the seats in front of us to appear at his knees, looking to be held in comfort while the ceremony started. Her brother gave up entirely on being seated and chose to wiggle like a snake between his mother and father under the seats in the row ahead of us, occasionally bumping into my daughter in her carseat. 

My father arrived shortly before the priest spoke. My son shifted in his seat in an attempt to do something, anything, other than sit still. I walked him over to my father so he could embrace him. I have to note that my son is a champion hugger. He uses his whole body to wrap around the lucky person who gets his love. He squeezes just enough to get his point across and settles in with his head. Sometimes he even pats your shoulder in reassurance. My father nuzzled into him and took a breath to hold it all in. their embrace lasted long enough that I had to change my stance to avoid blocking the guests seating themselves. I might have even left my son there had the spell not been broken by his young, constantly changing attention span. 

The priest gave a traditional New England sermon, with forced chuckle inducing words peppered in to relieve some of the tension. He remarked that at this funeral, no tears are being shed. The family before him were known for their emotions to be set aside. We all stared back with our blue eyes, waiting to say our final goodbye. When he spoke of my grandfather’s “heaven,” he told us to picture a farm. Put a field of corn in there, peel back the layers of the husk to find perfect ears, waiting to be devoured. My grandfather would have his favorite brand of tractor there. We shouldn’t expect it to be clean because toys are meant to get dirty. I had to smile in irony. In so many ways I was like all the family around me but in this way I was not. I did not need religion to help me find peace with his passing. I did not need to picture him in his youth with a shiny new tractor that he has already splattered with mud. I did not need to picture the sweet corn growing in his field. I already had tasted that corn. His farm is still standing. The crops tended by my two uncles and two cousins today. The farmer’s market storefront, managed by my aunt, still sells their crops. No one needed to picture the fruit of my grandfather’s labor. Looking around the room, we were all living proof.

I patted my small daughter’s back as she looked around behind me, her big blue eyes searching for recognition. The otherwise silence broken by the priest speaking and my daughter releasing her tension with an adult sounding wind. My cousin turned to me and we suppressed our laughter like children. My husband nervously put his large hand to his face and tried to hide the smile that he couldn’t help at her bottom eruptions. The sounds came to an end at the start of the line for final goodbyes. When it was our turn, I looked at my grandfather for the final time with my son. He had grown thin and pale in the last ten years, while his mind slowly deteriorated. He was almost a stranger now. He always had a big round face, and a stout figure to match. His clothes looked big on him even in the casket. His hands laid unnaturally on his chest. I pictured him in his kitchen, sitting with his feet flat on the floor, leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. Occasionally, he'd press his knees inward and look up at the small television showing the running stock ticket at the bottom of the screen. I told my son to say goodbye to great grandpa while holding his small hand gently. “Why doesn’t he say goodbye to me?” he asked. I led him outside and softly told him that he was gone. He won’t say goodbye again. My eyes filled with tears but I sucked in a breath instead. My son was in deep thought and kept asking questions, to which I answered as factually as I could. 

We waited in the car for the rest of the family to make their way, I heard my cousin’s wife crying in the van next to us. She must have met him after his dementia set in. She certainly didn’t share our strong genes to hold back our feelings. My sister led her two boys outside and she gave me a sideways smile, desperately sucking in air to hold it in, like we all had done that day. She smiled down to her elementary aged sons, escorting them inside her van a few cars over from us. I offered my other sister a mint. She was wearing her “boy” clothes because our family wouldn’t understand her true identity wasn’t as she was born. They were already dealing with so much and she didn’t want to have to explain herself while in a dress. She looked familiar wearing the suit similar to her old work uniform, hair pulled back into a low ponytail. She wore the clothes and her body in a suppressed way that she was so used to perfecting, it almost seemed real. “Thanks.” she said, stuffing the box of mints into her pocket, trying to make small talk from the hood of my car. I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, squinting into the sunny day, awkwardly tugging at my dress, aware of the ease I had being the gender I was born with inside and out. 

We followed each other in a line of cars flashing four ways to the cemetery. My grandfather laid in a closed casket over a fake grass rug covered hole. A marine played a horn nearby while two more ceremoniously folded the flag that lay over his casket. I felt the tears coming then and turned to my sister in her suit. I didn’t expect to find her where I did and I saw the welling of her own tears. I took a deep breath and held it in. A marine handed the folded flag to my grandmother in her black pants and flowered blouse. Her curly, grey, wiry hair floating in the breeze. My father’s only sister said something in haste before she stomped up to her father’s casket, plucked a red rose from a vase and laid it on the top of his casket. She walked around the other side, avoiding the vase of flowers she had tipped over. She pushed something into her mother’s hands. My grandmother held the red rose to her chest, deep in thought. We all lingered until my grandmother was escorted to her car, humming to herself. I wondered if it was a song that meant something to her and her late husband or if it was just a tune she had in her head. 

While driving away, I told my husband, half listening while texting on his phone, about my great uncle who had passed away a few years before we had met. He was also a marine but was buried at Arlington. “Holy shit.” my husband remarked, suddenly interested, or pretending to be. My great uncle was also in World War II. He had met his wife in Japan, a geisha. I warned my son ahead of time that there could be a gunshot and not to be scared. I even held him in my arms, something I had not done in months because of my pregnancy and my now shared attention with his newborn sister. To his disappointment, there was no gun salute to my grandfather. Only the reverberation of the horn in the air while we stood silent under a tree. 

At my grandmother’s house, my aunt unpacked the lunch she had prepared on the dining room table using the dishes that shared our family’s Thanksgiving meals for years. My son sat on the floor of the front room with my two nephews and my cousin’s daughter. I sat in a rocking chair nursing my daughter looking on at their angelic faces. My father entered the room, comfortable taking a seat in a chair that he had sat in countless times while growing up in the very same house. “Oh, this must be where the kid’s picnic is!” he said with a big, toothy grin, reminiscent of his late father. To no one in particular my father repeated twice with a faint Boston accent, “You really could take any of these kids and mix ‘em up and they'd look like you couldn’t know the difference!” I smiled and rocked my baby in the chair. He was right. All four of the children could be interchangeable and passable as siblings and cousins. My son was the only child without blue eyes in the bunch. His eyes still sparkled just the same as he listened to his cousin’s banter. They all giggled as my youngest nephew dictated his own purposely strange eating habits in a silly voice. His older brother, showed the age difference between the youngest in the room and himself by commenting on how “unfunny” he was being while also pretending not to giggle. 

Hours later, the family made their way outside to sit in the warmth of the sun while I nursed my young daughter in another rocking chair. She begged to be burped and I walked with her on my shoulder, looking at the pictures on display. My aunt scooped the mustard and mayonnaise left out for long enough into the trashcan while her husband placed dishes from the dining room table to the kitchen island, gently clanging glass on the metal tabletop. On the refrigerator there was a small portrait of a handsome young man who looked so much like my cousin. I knew it had to be my grandfather from the way he was dressed and the lack of color. I always thought that my cousin didn’t look particularly like his father or mother in a striking way and understood then that he did bare the family resemblance now that I stared at my grandfather as a young man. Each one of us a small part of my grandmother or grandfather in an obvious way, especially our sincere blue eyes. I smiled at the thought. Even though we said goodbye to our grandfather, his resemblance lives on in my cousin’s child-like features, in my father’s round face, and in my uncle’s sense of humor. I held my daughter in the nest of my elbow smiling down at her at the reassuring thought. She grinned first with just her mouth, then her whole face, her eyes engulfed by her big round cheeks. Her toothless open smile a reflection of my grandfather at his happiest.