Funeral Tuesday

I stood in the hallway of the funeral home that sits a block and a half from my parents’ house, eyes fixated on the carpet, listening to the sounds of my family members sniffling around me. I was frozen in place, gasping back my own sobs, letting the tears fall down my face without wiping them away and thinking “This might be the worst moment of my life so far.”

It was pretty awful, but as I am prone to hyperbole, it may not have actually been the worst moment. I’m not going to catalogue the awful moments in my life here, because wouldn’t that be a bummer to read? And I’m not quite in the mood for such a downer. The true lesson of the last few days is one that we hear all the time: life is too short to dwell on that sort of stuff and you should tell the people you love that you love them. Right now.

But as I stood in that funeral home listening to the keening cries of grief coming from the room in which the open casket lay, I somehow absorbed the pain of my family as they stood around not knowing what to do. I felt it was my duty to remain calm, and, being a weeper, that was very difficult for me. It’s just as well – given a difficult task, I had something to concentrate on that got me through the next 100 hours or what felt like it as we received guests for my uncle’s wake. We are Irish and so I was disappointed that there were no teetering groups of old gin-blossomed drunks singing “Danny Boy” and passing out in their whiskey glasses. I resolved to play that role myself and I commissioned my brother to stock up on booze for the post-wake social at my parents’ house, but the combination of jet lag and sadness brought me down after 2 beers.

The next day we gathered again in the funeral home to escort my uncle’s body through the last rituals it would receive before it was placed into the cold ground. With nothing to do I leaned against the wall and looked at the sign outside the door for a long time. It said his name and the words “Funeral Tuesday.” You know how when you say a word over and over (like “tartlets”) it sounds silly or loses meaning? Funeral Tuesday began to seem to me like a special night at a restaurant or family dinner like Taco Night or Happy Hour Friday or even on the web where we have Wordless Wednesday. “Sorry, I can’t meet you tonight because it’s Funeral Tuesday.” And I imagined sharing that observation with Uncle Steve and how he would laugh, and that made me want to laugh so I coughed into my hand and prayed that I would not be overcome by a fit of inappropriate giggling.

This was the first time, as an adult, that I have had occasion to participate so closely in the full array of post-death rituals of our Irish Catholic background. The 18-hundred-hour-long wake, the oft-repeated thanks for condolences and the observations “It was so sudden, etc.” Dressing for the funeral the next morning, I was struck by how similar our rituals were to preparing for a wedding day, except that the groom was silent. The limousine rides around town, the policemen saluting us as we drove by, even the jokes and toasting with our glasses raised high at the reception afterwards were joyless. We missed him. He should have been there.

Throughout it all a constant stream of absurd observations ran through my head. The predictable things ran through it too: I cried when I saw my grandfather crying, I tried not to look at my dad as he delivered the exceptionally beautiful eulogy, I felt grateful that a few of my dear friends showed up for the wake or funeral. But little odd things like Funeral Tuesday kept bugging me: the over-use of incense at the church (“Are they going to burn him right here?!”), the not knowing what to do when someone gave me a flower at the gravesite (put it on the casket, duh), the urge to check my e-mail on my phone, and this tweet that was in my head the whole time: