Day 279 (Recall) Celebrate

I flick off the dumb-fuck who drives too slow and makes me miss my exit to the gym and resign myself to rest as I drive home. 


"It's probably a good thing," I tell myself. I'm pretty tired and I have the viewing to go to at 7 and I need some sleep. It feels like my eyes have barely shut when the Baby is hovering over me and poking me awake. 


"Get up," I groan and snuggle back into my sheets. "Seriously, get up. There's a mass before the viewing."


I groan a little louder because of course there's a mass before the viewing and of course I'm not going to be dressed in time. I grumble and practically roll off my bed and attempt to find something I can wear because I'm not sure if you're supposed to treat viewings like a funeral or like a preview of the funeral. Do I have to wear black? Is it supposed to be formal? Are these heels inappropriate to wear tonight? 


Half an hour late, we roll up to the funeral home... and promptly circle the damn place for about ten minutes attempting to find a parking space because the parking lot, the sidewalk, and even the next-door businesses are filled with cars and vans, several of which are rocking the Filipino flags. 


"Just park!" I say, frustrated.


"I can't." The Baby sounds as annoyed as I am, glaring at every "No Parking" and "Tow-away Zone" sign like she could burn it with her sight. "We're gonna get towed if I park here."


"Fuck it. We're not missing this mass. Just park!"


"You'd better not blame me when your car gets towed." She warns me even as she pulls into a parking space behind a dry cleaners that has the ever-present "Business parking only!" sign right above it.


Our heels clack on the back alley as we power-walk it to the funeral home and I barely avoid dipping my pumps into dog doodie. We pass by the front, the Baby pointing out the cars of the my aunt's immediate family and I try to walk as far away from the hearse as I could get. A tall man in glasses opens the door for us. We sign into the guest book and walk over to the sitting room, belated realizing that people were literally pouring out of the room. Walking through the room, we saw that every seat and couch were packed with people, several of them standing on the sides, a few of my aunt's nieces running around, seemingly oblivious to the ceremony at hand. 


The Baby and I stand together for the duration of the ceremony, minus a point where I catch my aunt's sister crying across the room and lose it for a moment, leaving the room. I take a bit to breathe outside before I cry completely inappropriately in the room and upset people. On the way back in, I realize that Kai was standing off to the side and hug him for a moment before walking back inside to stand by my sister. When the mass has ended and the priest tells us to go in peace, my aunt's eldest son, Paul, walks behind the podium. Beside his mother's open casket below the images of her life playing on the screen above, he invites everyone in the room, "to not mourn her death, but celebrate her life."


...it's a little easier said than done when the Baby and I have to go through the line of sobbing, red-rimmed relatives that we greet. You never really know what's the most appropriate thing to say in cases like these and "I'm sorry for your loss" just doesn't seem to quite cut it but I repeat it and hope that it's okay. I hug my aunt's children, her husband, her sisters, her brothers-in-law and stoop down to hug her mother. (This grandmother's husband was a distant relative of my maternal grandfather)


My Lola hugs us, kisses us on our mouths and smells us as she tells us we're pretty and she's so sad to have lost her daughter. Krissy tells us later on that she was just devastated at losing her daughter, asking God why he hadn't taken her instead...


The Baby concurs, "I think there has to be a law against nature for a parent to go before their child."


I believe it too, but I'm not sure how to say it in Ilonggo...and I'm sure it'd upset Lola anyway even if I knew how. The next few hours pass on without me even realizing it. We greet people we haven't seen in years, marvel at the changes and laugh off the multiple instances of people mistaking us for each other.


At some point, I realize I'd really love a cigarette, grabbing Kai on my way out. We sit on the back stoop of the funeral home for a while and he teaches me to crack the filter to release the gel that turns the cig into menthols. We talk for a while, catch up on meaningless fluff like work and school, and the not-so-meaningless like our deteriorating relationships with people and, on a reminiscent note, the last funeral I'd gone to: his father's. 


"I don't remember it well." I confess to him. Kai smiles a little, 


"Neither do I." He says. "It took a while for it to really sink in." When he tells me just how long, I balk: Almost a decade long, it took for him to accept his father's death. To be fair, he was really young (my own Baby was a bit traumatized) so the details kind of fell to the sides. I wonder if my aunt's family will go through the same grieving process and how long it'll take for them to let this death sink in. At some point, we watch Donny, my aunt's youngest, walk to the end of the parking lot, flanked on either side by friends. Even before he disappears behind the SUVs, I know he's out to smoke a joint and, within minutes, my thoughts are confirmed when Kai and I watch the lazy haze of smoke rise and seemingly pause underneath the solitary streetlamp of the lot. 


Inconspicuous much?


"It's a shame," Krissy says later on in the evening when the night is dwindling on. "That it took a tragedy to bring everyone together."


The words carry more weight than some people in the room realize.


"Did you think," I hear the Baby ask as I watch Mom talk to Krissy's a few rows ahead of us. "That we'd ever be under the same roof again?"


We sit in silence, me, Krissy, the Baby, and Ella for a moment before Krissy honestly replies, "No. I prayed for it, but I didn't think it would happen."


Neither did I. But there we were, sitting in a row like we'd done a hundred times before, like the years of infighting, feuding and shit-talking didn't really matter. I looked up on the screen above my aunt's coffin to the flashing pictures and decided, you know what? It really doesn't matter; my aunt lived and died and people were here to celebrate it. All the white noise from the years ago don't have a place here, where those who loved her are gathered...


I'm standing on the driveway of my childhood home, facing the cul-de-sac. I hear a car door slam, turn to my right and watch my aunt get out of her car, fresh out of work in her scrubs. She sees me, smiles as she waves hello and walks into her house through the open garage. 


That's how I'm going to remember her, that's how she'll be burned in my memory and I want to believe that it's how she would've liked it. 




Written 9.3.11