Lisa and Marianne

Marianne's memorial service is Tuesday, after I get off work, which is convenient. This is always what one looks for in the death of one's aunt: the convenience of the service.

On Monday, my supervisor gives me a task that will remove my prep periods the next day. I ask if I can leave a little early then, as I have to get to my aunt's service. He says, "Of course, take care of yourself." He leaves the room and, for the first time in all this, I want to cry. I can't say why that is a breaking point, only that it is. The online sympathy I have received bordered on embarrassing. Her death affected me only indirectly. His comment brings me closer to the feelings of sadness this would stir in the chest of a normal person. I don't have to be only concerned with the pain of others. I am allowed to have some small hurt of my own.

I take a few deep breathes and the urge to cry abates. I teach the day as though it is any other.

I do not feel unresolved about her death, as has been the case with other deaths. I have mourned a few more keenly because they died suddenly and things were left unsaid: Kelley, whom I knew over a decade before his death and then barely knew after; Melissa, who had the potential again to be a close friend and never would now; Todd, whose death took me by surprise despite his professed suicidality. Each of them had life left in them that would never now come to fruition. With the ailing and elderly, there is a chance to get these things out, even if one doesn't.

I did not go to Marianne's bedside. I didn't know what I had in me to say to her. By the time I found out how far gone she was, her mind was no longer a resident of her body. Her dying made me uneasy in a way I didn't care to look in the eye.

When I found out that my grandmother had died years ago, I was at work. As my mother told me not to come down, I returned after my lunch break to finish out the day. It was not until days later that I mentioned to anyone at my job that my grandmother had died. That I had stayed baffled them. What better reason to take a half day than the death of a grandparent? Then, it seemed best to keep things as normal as I could.

While I am on a run Monday, I receive a message from my mother, telling me to call her. She, like many parents, does not embrace the succinctness of a text in times like these. She is grieving, though, and I can hardly blame her.

I don't know what new misfortune could provoke her call, but I curse at my outdated phone as it refuses to do anything until I have spent three blocks fumbling with it.

"I wanted to know if you were coming to the service tomorrow," she says, her voice small and tired. My mother is many things, but small is not often among them.

I say that I will be. She then tells me that there will be a gathering after the service to have catered Italian food after, which I am uncertain I will be able to attend. Amber must wake early the next morning. She works better having slept. I have Wednesday off in preparation for Thanksgiving and so a later night affects me less.

My mother starts to say goodbye, but I stop her. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she says, sounding a world away from that. "I'm okay."

"If you aren't, you can call me."

She disconnects because there doesn't seem much else to be said.

Life had worn Marianne down in these eighty years. She was always a smoker, which did not help her longevity. She did not live fast, but she did live her own way. What I remember most are Halloween parties at her rustic house, how hard it was to drive the dirt road up a mountain. I remember her at backyard parties my parents threw, sitting by the porch. These gathering became fewer and fewer. They were no longer necessary to entertain children aging into adults.

Marianne had a chicken coop and I would occupy myself as a child trying to feed them bugs and berries I found. I thought it curious and delightful that someone could have so many chickens without being a farmer.

She made mayonnaise chocolate cake that I didn't care to try until I was in my late teens -- mayonnaise only barely being appropriate in chicken salad -- and then found delicious. I don't know if she had another signature dish, if this was something she made regularly or only a few times that stuck in my memory.

My mother's side of the family speaks with faintly transatlantic accents, though they grew up only a town away from where I did. No one else I know speaks that way. Marianne especially sounded like a watered down Katherine Hepburn, huskier for the cigarettes. My mother does not have that accent or I was so used to her speech being my template from infancy that I am incapable of detecting it now.

I am a generation askew with the people I consider my cousins, as my grandmother gave birth to my mother within a year of Marianne having her first child. One of my cousins once demanded to know why I called Marianne by her first name rather than "grandma" and were incredulous when I insisted that Marianne was not my grandmother.

When I visited my grandmother for decades, my aunts and uncle would be in my grandmother's kitchen, smoking around the table. This was where they were comfortable being without announcement. My grandmother did not mind the company. Marianne would come down to do her laundry there, as the washer and dryer were in the kitchen. The house hasn't been in the family since a little after my grandmother's death, but I still imagine Marianne there, the small backyard visible through the windows behind her.

My brothers and I do not do with my parents. If I dropped by my parents' unannounced, they would be glad to receive me, but they would also find it strange that I had not called ahead. My aunts lived no more than a few miles from their mother and Cold Spring was always a closer community than the one in which I grew up. Why not use my grandmother's kitchen as a social hub?

On Tuesday morning, I ask my parents the address of the post-service catering. They only tell me the road. I comment, a touch tired, that I will look for the streamers and balloons then.

When I get to work, a kid asks if I usually dress this way outside of the facility. I am not sure to which part of my ensemble he takes objection, as being all in black is only marginally different than my standard. I explain that I have to go to a funeral later and did not see the point in changing. He asks who died, then crosses himself when I tell him it was my aunt. "But no," I tell the kid, "I usually wear jeans and either a t-shirt or sweater, depending on the weather."

He tells me that black is all wrong for a funeral. I ought to have worn bright colors.

Marianne will be cremated. I am unclear if this means her cremains will be present at the service. My paternal grandmother's were, as were Melissa's. It isn't essential to the process of the service. Having a body there, discomfiting as it is, makes a sort of sense. There is something that looks enough like your loved one to bear your grief. It is a struggle to reconstitute dust into one's aunt.

When we arrive, Amber introduces a possibility for which I was not prepared: that Marianne might be cremated afterward, but that her body will be front and center at the service. This is not the case, and I am not sorry for that. Let my aunt rest now. She lingered longed in that form than she cared to.

Wanting to find the bathroom, I encounter a woman I don't know picking over a plate of cookies. "I'll steal these," she says to herself, unaware yet that I'm there. When she notices me, she looks embarrassed, replacing some of the cookies she had taken.

"Take whatever," I say. "There isn't any point to them otherwise." They are mediocre cookies. (I couldn't in good conscience allow her to pilfer alone.)

A slideshow of pictures of Marianne plays on a flat screen television. My mother says not to look at it, as it brings people to tears. By this, she seems to mean Marianne's widower, Big Ed. If presented with any three pictures of Amber after her death, I would be inconsolable, so this is maybe not saying as much as my mother assumes.

I do not see anyone else weeping over it, but I admit to not looking very closely. It gives glimpses of the long life Marianne led, most interesting for the time when she was young, married, then a mother. The latter two points occur when the former was still in force.

As my decades older aunt, she was a one-dimensional figure in my life. I do not remember a solid conversation I had with her, only polite exchanges. She likely sent me birthday cards through my childhood, but I have none of them any longer. I am sure she congratulated me at my wedding, but she didn't have to make a special effort to it.

I watch the rotation of pictures a few times without tears. If I were in them, I might have felt differently. What I gained is that she was carefree once and that she briefly resembled Morticia Addams -- high praise indeed.

I learn almost more about her life in her obituary and this slideshow than I had in the thirty-eight years prior.

I don't know what my burden is for knowing my family. I don't put myself out there to be known by them, so I feel it is reciprocal. I don't ever expect them to read the things that I've written, not even my novels. I've long since given up the idea that I am interesting to more than a small subsection of people, and my family is not among them. But when one of them dies, the story ends all at once. If I don't know it, I'm never going to hear it from their lips. My mother used to say that I should investigate my father before the people in his life went senile, but I did not take her up on that, because it seemed awkward. I don't expect to change my approach to members of my extended family because one of them has died. I would like to say that I would do this, but I find it uncomfortable, so I won't.

Amber nestles herself in the corner of the room with her phone. It is not that Amber doesn't want to be here as that she doesn't need to be. I do not require the emotional crutch of her presence. She is here because it is the right thing for her to be doing, but it isn't something I need. This is nothing I could not face on my own. At my grandmother's funeral, I needed her and she couldn't come. At Melissa's, I needed her and she could. Here, I appreciate her, but I don't begrudge that she is separate from the proceedings.

I stand near her, most of the time out of habit. My parents keep introducing us to people I don't know and whose names I do not bother remembering, assuming there will not be a test. To these people, my mother appends that I write books. To be fair, this is by far the most pertinent fact about me and how I would prefer to be identified. My father jokingly suggests that I ought to have brought a box of my books to sell. I assure him that I'm not a vulture, and also that people at funerals aren't up for buying fantasy series to dilute their grief.

It is two hours of milling about in a room past its capacity until the service proper. One of the funeral directors pops in a few times to adjust the thermostat to compensate for all the heat we are putting out. It is a cool late November evening, not cold, and people are entering and exiting the main door in a constant rotation, giving airflow tainted by a pernicious cloud of cigarette smoke.

Ed approaches me as though I am his favorite nephew, his eyes red-rimmed, and embraces me as if my loss can be close to what he suffers.

While I recognize my family members, we do not all speak. We do not, at that, all acknowledge one another. They are here to mourn together. I might be here because I understand it is appropriate, that staying away without a compelling reason would be shameful.

While the formal service takes place, I do not look at those gathered. Instead, I fixate on a spot above Jesus's right hand on the crucifix. It is not that I am avoiding looking, merely that I pay more attention to the words if I do not need to couple them with the pastor.

The pastor says he is proud his churches non-denominational and that there are many paths to God. He isn't aiming to proselytize this evening, which is points in his favor. I have been to funerals where the priest treated us as a captive audience for his hellfire conversion screed instead sympathizing. This affable pastor's reaching across the aisle is only to the Jews, though, in that a synagogue uses his church weekly.

The pastor was good enough to admit he had never met my aunt. He had spoken on the phone last night with my cousin Allison, whom he had also not met prior. Nothing worse than a phony pastor. His only connection to my family seems to be that his congregation is in Cold Spring and he is Episcopal, as I assume Marianne was.

The pastor suggests that, since he is being ecumenical, we might want to observe the Quaker tradition of sharing what Marianne means to us. By this, he is acknowledging more that he did not know her and would like us to fill up some time before his closing prayer. I am not casting aspersions. I far prefer it to the pastor pretending they knew the deceased, especially when it is little more than a MadLib version of a service, e.g. "[MARIANNE] loved nothing more than to [COOK], and everyone in the family knew that. I bet everyone here has fond memories of [MARIANNE] [COOKING]."

My cousin Jesse (second cousin, but not many years my senior), stands at his suggestion, having prepared remarks. He speaks of how much it meant to him to share the meals my aunt made him, how he would go into the kitchen while she cooked and would be interrogated by the circle of wise women in there with her, helping her, but mostly gossiping. I do not recollect having been privy to these meals, but I had my own grandmothers for those. He talks of her endless worried calls borne of having a police scanner. I'm reminded of my own mother in our group texts.

His sister Kate goes the next, saying that she recently moved across the country, but was able to get back for the service because her friends wanted to help her to repay some of her perpetual kindness. She inherited this from her mother, who was taught this by Marianne. She tells a story of when Marianne let her believe her brothers and she had saved the flock of chickens from escape, when what they had done was terrorize the birds into exhaustion.

I can think of nothing to say to the gathering and would be the wrong one to say it anyway.

In parting, I tell Jesse how well he did. He thanks me and says that this was harder for him than his dissertation.

I perseverate on whether I will go to the meal afterward. This fixation is a safer place to squirrel away in my emotions than the wooden box in which the ashes of my eldest aunt repose. It is full enough.

I opt not to, because I ought to get Amber home.

I take her to a diner up the street.

"What's good here?" she asks for the sake of making conversation.

"I wouldn't know, it's been decades." I get the same chicken souvlaki platter I had then, something Amber ignores aside from my helping of fries.

"Do you know how I made myself seem sad there?" I ask Amber.

"Why did you want to seem sad?"

"It was a memorial service," I say. "The human thing to do is be sad at those."

"You thought of Jareth." There is no question to it. How well does my wife know me and how does she love me so that she can step all over my punchlines?

The only time I teared up during the ceremony without goosing it was when the funeral director said that, since preparing Thanksgiving was important to Marianne, we all should leave a plate open for her. This image above everything else made me weak.

I wake around 2:30 and cannot sleep after. There is this prickling sadness behind my eyes, undifferentiated. Crying might relieve it, but I am in bed with Amber and I don't want to wake her. I read the rest of my current book, thinking it will distract me. After half an hour, the book is finished and the feeling remains.

Why aren't I human enough to be able to grieve at the memorial service of a woman I knew all my life? Why leave it until 2:30 in the morning, and then only a teaspoon?

I don't feel right the next day, my throat hoarse as though I had been crying, but without the luxury of knowing I had. It is the hangover of tears without their catharsis. I choose to blame my interrupted sleep, though I write this without real confidence.

last watched: Schitt's Creek
reading: A Warning by Anonymous