The Funeral

It’s cold and windy today and I really don’t have the time for this. My father looks like death as he lay in his casket, whatever death is supposed to look like. His face is so white. His hair looks askew, regardless of the poor attempt to tame it by combing it back. I hate wearing high heels and where the hell is my sister? The lines on his face look like deep valleys crammed with years of tough living. Embedded in there so deep I can’t see where the lines end and where his face begins. His fingers are crippled, and his body is frail. I don’t want to touch him, but I do.

He feels so cold and the distance between us feels just the same in death as it did in life. I wonder how long I should stand here and stare at my dead father. Should I keep holding on to his hand until I feel some speck of grief? Should I wait for some long-lost sentiment he’s going to send me from the afterlife? What’s the edict here? The smell of roses is making me gag. I should be praying, but I’m not.

I let go and feel the need to wipe my hand on my skirt, but I don’t. I don’t know what to do, where to go or who to talk to. I’d like to run out the door, slam it shut and leave all the memories of a broken childhood. They can all be buried with him, as deep into the ground they can go. I should be crying, but I’m not.

There aren’t a lot of people here I recognize. The stiff men running the show in black suits make me uneasy. My aunt is here; pretending she liked the man. My uncle would call it her familial duty. He is drunk. I can hear it in his laughter and it’s surprisingly soothing. I envy his state of bliss. I take a deep breath and sit in one of the awkwardly colored red velvet chairs. I should sign that book at the door to say I was here, but I don’t.

There is a tall man with long white hair pulled back in a ponytail standing outside smoking a cigarette. I can smell the smoke as it seeps under the door. I’d kill for a drag. He’s talking to another disheveled man who seems overdressed for such an occasion. I’ve never seen them before, but do I recognize right away from which part of my father’s life they were from. The latter part, the better part. The part that brought my father some understanding and solidarity. He recognized in them, as I do now, seeing them here today, the same suffering in their eyes that lived in his. They shared the same stories and had the same nightmares.

They fought the same demons, carried the same inner wounds and not the kind you can slap a bandage on or sew up like torn skin. Bodies damaged by shrapnel; their lungs poisoned by the polluted air. They were damaged, suicidal, and addicted to drugs. Just like my father, they were Vietnam Veterans, and they were my father’s friends and here to say goodbye.

From 1969 to 1970 my father served in the Vietnam war, drafted at 18. He believed it was his patriotic duty, a gift to his country. He bought what the government sold him. He feared Communism and wanted to do what he believed he should. Did he even know what Communism was? Probably not.

My father survived the war but was dead inside, as lifeless as he lay here today. I knew this because I lived the nightmare alongside him. I was the child of a man who never left the battlefield and lived the pain of its aftermath. I heard the nightmare provoking screams that would shake the dining room chandelier. I saw the shame he carried on his shoulders that weighed him down so much, he couldn’t stand up straight. Every new day brought uncertainty, turmoil, and chaos. My father built a wall between himself and the world, and that included me.

We lived in a house of cards that I tip-toed thru every single day of my childhood and into my adolescence. I watched him become so enraged he would pull a man over on the side of the road and beat him for not using his turn signal. I watched him become so sad that he lay in fetal position on the floor sobbing for hours. He drank until he fell, screamed until he lost his voice. I watched him slap my mother’s face just for saying good morning

My mother feared my father and for good reason, but all the while she helped him lift and carefully place each card that made up the walls of our fragile home. My mother protected him, cared for him like a wounded animal. She made excuses for the drugs, violence, and his inability to work or simply function as a normal human being.

She held tight to her own resentments. She didn’t limp like my father who carried shrapnel in his knee, but she suffered her own battle scars caused by love lost. She carried the memory and a faded picture of first love. My sister’s father. He was drafted only one month after my mother became pregnant. Killed after only two months there. Her pinky finger broke when she fell on the pavement the day they came with the news. Just like her heart, it never quite healed and my mother would never be the same.

My father was only home a few months, demons in tow, when he met my mother. When she saw the uniform, she didn’t see the man, she saw her dead lover. They married, had babies, and so began the circus of disfunction.

Our family had a strange existence and we stuck out like a sore thumb there in 70’s suburbia. Lined trees, streetlights, dads shuffling off to work at the break of dawn, moms at the door in their pink robes, handing them coffee and waving goodbye. My mother did not own a pink robe, nor did my father go to work.

He slept a lot in the early days, then later found his solace in drugs and alcohol. It was a match made in heaven, a love affair that lasted most of his life. He sought it out to keep the terrors inside asleep, but on the contrary, it aroused them. The first buzz, the initial drunk sometimes brought out a laugh. I remember feeling happy in those brief moments my father smiled. They were short moments in time that felt like freedom and ease. I held tight to them.

Then the darkness surfaced, and he turned angry. The more he drank, the angrier he became. His voice became higher, and we knew what was to come. Then began my mother’s great race against time. She had only minutes to get the windows and curtains shut so the outside could not hear the evils about to spill from my father and blow down our house of cards. She shut us in with her. She should have let us out.

We all lived in hell. My mother, my sister, my father, and me. We had no idea how to escape it. We didn't know how to heal or live another way. It was like a pile of rubble that we were buried underneath with no way out. We didn't pray or embrace religion; there was no God in our home. We never felt peace or heard laughter. My father's rage was so intense and so out of control. The sun circled the earth again and again but never shone on us. I was just a little girl, a frightened little girl who stands here today as broken now as I was then

I was 15 years old when my mother died at the hands of my father. He beat her to death in a drunken rage. All I remember about that day was noise and then quiet. I should forgive now that he’s dead, but I don’t.

In the years that followed, I went to my mother’s stone as often as I felt I should and saw my father once behind a glass. I think he may have tried to tell me tell me he was sorry, but probably not. I never went back to either place again.

When I leave here, I will follow a very short procession and watch him be placed into the ground. There will be no military honors, no six-gun salute, no flag draped over him. Not for a man who murdered his wife. Just his kin and a small group of men who understood. They understood what made this sane man mad and this quiet man erupt. They knew because they were there in that jungle too.

When a man who has no soul dies, where does he go? Does he turn into a hollow shell and just cave in? Is there no afterlife for a sinner, no heaven, no eternal paradise? Will my father find the peace in death that he couldn’t find in life? Will he burn eternally for his sins or be forgiven?