Death, it seems, comes not from on high, nor in a carriage, nor on little cat feet, but with casseroles. Or in my Uncle Aaron’s case, and in my Aunt Ava’s condo, also with babka, bagels and cookies. Death seems to have a preoccupation with carbs.
Unsurprising to those who know me, I have a minor obsession with death. I’m currently watching season 3 of Six Feet Under, reading Julian Barnes’ mortality memoir, Nothing to Fear, and working on a short story whose first line is “When your roommate is a vampire, you have to solve the tampon issue”—and no item on this list is particularly uncommon for my life. My own suicidal tendencies are so recurrent that I’ve said the song of my life is a funeral dirge. It's not that I am much frightened of nor concerned about what happens after death, nor am I enthralled with the concept of it. It’s more that I am quite often in pain and find bemusing the fact that some day I will die, like everyone else.
I have been to six funerals in my life. My first was my grandfather’s wake; he hung himself when I was twelve. I don’t remember much about the service other than I very quickly grew tired of people’s pity for me and their anger toward him. The second was my stepfather’s father who died when I was nineteen; I can’t recall exactly why, perhaps a heart attack. The sadness I felt seemed abstract, as if my grief were a Rothko painting. I didn’t know this grandfather well, but I liked him. Primarily, I felt for my stepfather. My mother’s mother died the next year from a stroke, and that was a huge, though not unexpected, loss. I took quite a break from death and funerals. Then, when I was 32, my ex-boyfriend Will overdosed. That was a weird, weird scene in which many people threw passionate bolts of love and hate in my direction. A few years ago a friend of mine’s dad died, and I went to his funeral to support her. And this past week, of course, I went to Philly for my Uncle Aaron’s.
My life experience with death is quite limited. I have only those six funerals. The only deaths I’ve witnessed have been those of dogs; I held their paws and bid them to go gently into that good night. I have watched scads of deaths and funerals on film and television and read of hordes of others, but nothing brings into high relief the artifice of those fictional ends of lives like going to an real, live funeral.
It’s not surprising that we humans paint the ends of human life in such saturated colors. We do, after all, paint everything else with more intensity. No birth, no first tooth, no first day of school, no pangs of adolescence, no first love, no break-up, no hellish job, no courtship, no marriage, no divorce, no bank robbery, no computer hacking, no crime investigation, no abortion, no political scandal, no betrayal, no ugly-duckling-turned-swan, no empire’s rising, no epiphany, no war, no peace and no death have the glamour, the sheen and the cleanliness of its fictive counterpart. Fictive lives are shinier than our real ones. Even the mess seems prettier.
And what these fictions cover up is exactly how tiresome the process of life is—even as they celebrate how wondrous it can be. The truth about funerals is that they bring bone-weariness and boredom. The casserole, that infinitely reheating self-contained dish that may be quite good or really bad but is never exceptional, may very well be the perfect metaphor for funerals.
My Uncle Aaron’s service was not much different from most funeral services. The Rabbi talked like Reverend Lovejoy, dropping the ends of sentences like stones off a cliff and then suddenly switching it up and making the last word soar like a swallow. The eulogy itself was a sudden apotheosis of my uncle. He was the loveliest, the warmest, the funniest, the most loving, the most generous, the most everything. My Aunt Ava sat directly in front of me sobbing fiercely, and I, being an empathetic crier, wept along with her. Other people cried too, while some didn’t. All listened to the Rabbi’s superlatives. The funeral service, is after all, for the living, and my family is as much like everyone else’s as it isn’t.
The living leave a funeral immersed in their own mortality—how can we not? Don’t ask for whom the casserole comes, it comes for thee. And plunged into my own mortal introspection, I thought about what I wanted for my eulogy. I don’t want superlatives, for one thing. I want whoever speaks at my service to show me as the complicated, contentious, sarcastic woman I am. A speaker with a strong sense of the absurd would be swell. I don’t want my living to remember some whitewashed, sanitized version of me. If they loved me well in life, they’re fully aware of my glorious faults and my faulty glory. They might as well get one last full measure.
This past fall when I was fully immersed in my suicidal font, I wrote a suicide note and started plotting my service. It was a profoundly pathetic experience, as well as a cathartic one. Nothing so much yanked me back from the brink as my self-laving in self-pity, and the fantasy service was the pitiable straw that broke the solipsistic camel’s back. Really, how many people have played “Moonlight Mile” at their funeral? This was the depth to which I had sunk, and stunned by my own operatic dismalness, I clawed my way out of the open grave.
I didn’t know my uncle Aaron very well; in fact, I’d not seen him in over 25 years. He may very well have been as exceptional as his eulogy described. I could just be seeing his service through my own sardonic lens, in which case shame on me. I didn’t know the man well, and yet I had to honor Aaron, my memory of him and his small imprint on my life, which will last as long as I do.
I also went because I wanted to serve as another buttress in my aunt’s monolith of grief; the more people who surround the grieving, the less they have to bear. It’s what the living do. We go and we eat bagels and we cry as we let others cry on us. We drink bad coffee and we pick at the babka. It may be banal, but it’s life, and therefore it is beautiful.
