Thursday, February 26, 2004

It's a Long Long Road out of Hell

Inside the funeral home we went. Outside is a coma of white—snow everywhere, and breaths coming out in white clouds.

Warmth hits. We're inside. Our breaths are no longer white clouds.

There's comfortable furniture all around. A leather couch, a few reclining chairs. In the far left corner I see another door, and it's into where the people that work here are. Beside the door is windows; I can see computers over there. I imagine deeper in those recesses is where they embalmed her. That's where they took her naked, dead old body and gave it embalming fluid. Where they took her face and made it beautiful with makeup, layer after layer of makeup, and cosmetics. Made it beautiful, too perfect.

An old woman greeted us in, she had not a read of emotion on her. Wonder if she's just hiding it? Or is she used to it? And why does she work here? Does she want to face death. Does she think it makes her know what it'll be like? Does she like the funeral process? I didn't know, and I wouldn't. For the best. It was for the best to not know her motives for being here. It was probably the branching trails of life ending here.

An old man is beside her. Wrinkles on his face, gray hair, the signs of old age. He wore church garments. A priest, or something. Some religious man. Another person leashed in religion, for better or for worse. It made him stronger though. Strength is all that matters, it seems. Truth isn't something worth facing. The truth that God might not be what we think he is, and God might not even exist. Well, the weakest man is often the strongest; the strongest man is often the weakest. The weaker, the better, the stronger. I'd believe in what I wanted to, thank you very much.

I was here with my cousin, Matt, my mother and father, my grandma and grandpa. In the right side of the building were two doorways. One had an easel and there was a picture on it. It says her name on it. Violet. That's my great grandma, I never knew her. I did know her, but I never knew her. The woman on the picture looks old yet not too succumbed to her years. Her hair wasn't grayed in that picture. It never was. Even when she died because she couldn't breathe anymore.

Fragments of her are in my mind. Fragments that can't ever be put together, they don't match. I never knew her, I only saw her as an old, dying creature. She always had the oxygen tank hooked up to her, the clear wires of it hooked in her nose—it was a forget-me-not of smoking. From smoking, you get this. From smoking, from the nicotine, you get its addiction, its stimulant effects. And while you get stimulated, you get killed. Pleasure for the lessening of your life. What some people will give for that. What some people will give for their lives. They'll kill it away so they can feel better,

My mom smokes, still smokes. Smoking is selfish. One of the most selfish things I can say off the top of my head. Smoking is a monster. The thing that makes a monster a monster isn't how it looks, but what it does, and what you know about it. And I know about smoking. "I'm going to die anyway," my mom says when I tell her stop smoking, when I think of great grandma violet.

I'm going to die anyway.

Well, I'm the one that gets to watch it. What a fun party, I get to be there when you're suffering from what once gave you pleasure. I get to watch you die for reasons you well knew were coming, and because you "were going to die anyway." I get to see you suffer and die from something you did to yourself because you "were going to die anyway." I guess if you want to follow in grandma Violet's footsteps and kill yourself by your own designs, that's fine with me.

It's nothing different than taking a gun and putting it in your mouth and pulling the trigger. Only this gun is a cigarette. And it takes a match to light it and it needs to be used over and over again so it can work its magic. The magic that is it giving you pleasure, poisoning your lungs, and killing you. This gun just takes more time.

When will it go off? Oh, wait, you're "going to die anyway." So I guess that makes it all right, doesn't it?

Doesn't it?

We sat in the seats for a while. It was me and Matt. There were other people there, people I didn't know. They exchanged their greetings, said their condolences, went about their ways.

My parents had told me I was going to go to this service. And I wasn't going to say anything about it. So I hadn't, even though I didn't want to be here. Even though God's time was no time to me. Here I was.

We were forced into the room. The one where the easel was there on the outside, showing grandma Violet.

It was like a church in there. The rows and rows of wooden booths for people to sit in. And there she was. She was the center of it all, and the center of the entire room.

An open casket stood. There she was. Hadn't they made her look pretty? I looked at her and felt something but brushed it aside. Although I wouldn't agree she was probably in heaven, I would agree she was done suffering. She was done with the suffering she had brought on to herself by smoking. And that was good. That's all well.

Motionless. She wasn't moving. Why wasn't she moving? She was dead. It is strange to see someone who's dead when you've never seen someone dead. It was strange to see her unmoving. I wanted her to move. But she wouldn't.

I looked at her and then sat down beside my brother, my mother and father further down the wooden booth. My mother looked pained, and rightfully so. And when she walked she limped. She had fallen on her foot and injured it again.

Soon it began. The old man with the wrinkles came in. He told some people who were beside her open casket that rosary service was beginning.

What was a rosary? I had never been to one, only heard of them.

I was in for a real treat, and I didn't even know it.

He kneeled down and everyone else kneeled down. I kneeled down too. Pushing my eyes to their sides, I saw in back of me that Matt wasn't kneeling. I wondered why I was kneeling, and decided I didn't want to be kneeling. But I knew my parents would complain if I got out of kneeling.

"Holy Mary mother of God. . ."

It sounded like a swear word. Holy Mary mother of God. I had heard that somewhere else, too. I remembered.

It was in a short story by Stephen King, from the short story collection Everything's Eventual. It was called "That Feeling, the One You Can Only Say in French," I thought. I had read it many times over and liked it.

It told of a woman that was in some kind of purgatory. She went through event after event and ended up at one point and started over. Then the events went through again.

Each time the woman had deja vu, and imagined things as they happened. But she still couldn't stop it and it all ended and started over again. It was a dark, interesting story. I wrote a lot of stories like that, ones that were fragments that, in the end, added to a whole. I thought over that while the man with wrinkles continued on.

He was holding a rosary in his hands. I would have just called it a crucifixion necklace, because that's what it was. But it was a "rosary." Or so I had been told. I could tell he was counting the beads of it, going all the way around and around. I thought maybe he'd be done after one time around and I could get the hell out of here.

"—Our father, who art in heaven—"

But it wasn't like that. He kept going on and on. It was so methodical. So strategic. I didn't say a word of what he was saying, but most everyone else did. They all said it together, in one coalescing mass. I wasn't even hearing the words anymore. I was just thinking.

To the side of her open casket were flowers. They were fake flowers. I thought it all looked so fake. The flowers were bright, a mosaic of colors. Dancing on your eyes they'd leave an after trail if you looked away.

"—and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil—"

Emotions welled into me like a big balled fist. It beat on me. I didn't want to show any emotion, I wouldn't cry I wouldn't show anything. It was the way I was, I wasn't going to go away from it.

The sounds of tissues, of noses blowing. Of people crying. Why cry if she's in heaven? If she's in a better place? You selfish people.

But that was how I would feel, too. But I had never known her, I had never known her. I hadn't—

"—holy Mary mother of God—"

I didn't have many feelings for her death. In a sense she had done it, she had smoked herself to death. But it was also old age too, but I had never known her. I had only seen her when she was old, without charisma, without much emotion. Without much of anything.

I had went to the nursing home, came to her hooked up to her hissing oxygen tank. Hiss, hiss, take in oxygen, live, hiss hiss. I had hugged her, but it meant nothing, and it probably meant nothing to her other than me accepting her and she accepting me.

The nursing home scared me. It was a collection of the old, the people who were gray and would die. It was the opposite of me, I didn't want to see it. I never want to see it.

She couldn't even do anything anymore by herself. She was on pills—pill after pill. One for depression, another for arthritis. Another for this, another for that. I would have rather just died than be on the pills. And they wondered why she was depressed. If I was old and knew soon I was going to die, I would be depressed too. I would wish I was already resting and not dealing with anything anymore.

Imagine having another help you dress, eat, go to the bathroom, walk, breathe—imagine everything you take for granted, which is you as an individual, is gone. That's what it was like for her, in that nursing home.

It's funny. We live our lives, and we suffer more than we feel pleasure. It's the truth. And then, when finally we are retired from working, when finally the world seems to be going too fast for us, we're given old age. We start to die—not that we don't start dying from the minute we're born—but we really start to see changes. What is the real reason for living?

The real reason is to be remembered. To be immortal when we're really mortal and already dead.

That's what writers seek to do, even if they don't admit it. We remember others, too. There's Einstein. There's Pythagoras. There's Democritus. It goes on and on.

We live to be immortal by some other way than what we are.

So I sat there. And I thought, and wondered, and waited.

It ended finally. Many were crying. I wasn't. I was sad, but I felt she had deserved to die. She had been suffering, and it had been her time to go for a while. It was good she was gone. Good in the way that her suffering was over.

It had been a numbing thing, the rosary. But I had conquered it, just like I have to conquer everything else that comes to me.

I thought that, when I died, I'd have myself cremated. And no funeral, nothing about Jesus saved me and sent me off to heaven. Just I was dead, and that was it. No reason to make a big deal out of my death. The people who care about me will remember me, and the people who don't care will never have met me, or will forget me. Simple as that.

Simple as that.
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