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Lulu Will Be Late for the Funeral

A story of grief

By Eric DovigiPublished 2 years ago 8 min read
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Saturday afternoon finally arrives. Lulu, who had insisted on taking over every detail, stalks through the house like a disappointed bird of prey. There’s nothing left to do. She searches for any activity or point of focus with which to keep away thoughts of her son.

But he’s everywhere. Sitting at the table, rooting through the fridge, lounging on the couch, bounding up and down the stairs. She can hear his bed creaking as he fidgets in his sleep during an afternoon nap. She can hear his bad singing voice, his off-rhythm guitar strums. His whispered Japanese at night, under the covers with a book-light, trying not to let his father, who dislikes being reminded of Japan and would be terse about any endeavor of his son’s to acquire the language, hear him. How strange it had felt for Luciana Mishima (née Cagnacci) to hear Japanese from the mouth of her boy, who looked, she thought, just like her father Ralph.

She strips down and gets in the shower. The water is too hot. Instead of adjusting the knob, she tucks her knees under her and crouches on the floor of the tub where it stings less. Downstairs, her husband comes home; she can hear the front door open and close, his heavy tread on the hardwood.

She tries to uncover the mystery of her son’s absence but can’t make sense of it. How could something as abstract as “ABO incompatibility reaction,” a phenomenon she had never even heard of until witnessing it, have such a clear and concrete impact on the world? How could something abstract cause the removal of a person whose presence was not only a fact in itself but an essential fact of her own life?

How much of Lulu had her son taken away? What memories of her did only her son possess? Did he have an idea of Lulu that was unique? Did he see her in a way that no else did? And when he died, what happened to this way of seeing Lulu?

What is this feeling, really? As her fingertips start to prune after the fifteenth minute, Lulu thinks, anxiety. It is anxiety that has put on the black cloak of grief and drags its feet around the house. The anxiety of having poured so much of herself, knowingly and unknowingly, into something that could so easily vanish. She wants him back to get herself back too.

No. In a fit of new passion, Lulu decides that she doesn’t want her son brought back to life. She wants her son to be better than alive.

He should have lived forever. Right up to the end of the universe and back around, meeting himself again at birth so that there would be no nook or cranny of time in which there was no Isao. She wants him spread right across the universe. Why not remove all spatial boundary too? Let Isao be God Himself, making and containing all matter. That way she could swim in him: everything she could touch or conceive of touching would be him. Every stone, tree, planet, star, person, would be her son. She herself would be him. She would be both his daughter and his mother in an endless loop of kinship. They would never be separated. And when she died, she would dissolve back into him. She would become him, and this would be the final perfect consummation of her love.

But even Mary lost her son.

After the twenty-fifth minute, there’s a knock on the bathroom door. “Lulu, we’re going to be late.”

Late? Late to what? Late to grief? Late to mourning? Lulu had arrived early to mourning.

She had mourned Isao on his first day of First Grade. She had kissed him on the forehead, triple-checked his backpack, indicated to him the contents of his lunchbox and reminded him where to go, which teacher was his, what time she’d be there to pick him up. He had looked nervous, but not too nervous. When Lulu and her husband had driven slowly away, the waving finished, the windows rolled up, they lingered long enough at the end of the street to see Isao sit down alone on the curb outside the front doors of the school.

Then, strangely, he took his lunch box out and start eating.

That had done it. In tears she made to get out of the car and run up to him to explain that he had to wait until noon to eat his lunch, and that he should go inside to find his classroom and his teacher—but her husband had held her back. “Give him a chance to learn by himself,” he said. So she watched from the street while her son ate his entire lunch on the curb outside the front doors of the school, at 8:00am. Only after the bustle had died down and he was alone on the curb did a custodian take Isao by the hand and walk him inside.

She had mourned his first armpit hair. Isao was playing basketball on the street outside the house with two neighborhood boys. He wore a Phoenix Suns jersey. Every time he leapt up into the air with is arms outstretched, Lulu could see, from the kitchen window, a faint black fuzz under his arms. While they were still playing she jumped in the car and drove to Target, where she filled a cart with Gillette razors, extra blades, a straight-razor that she thought her husband might want to teach him to use, some shaving cream (a can of Barbasol to have on hand in the cupboard plus a handful of better organic stuff for regular use), beard oil that was on sale, after-shave balm, pre-shave balm, a mini coffee-table book with different beard styles she thought he would find funny, mustache wax for just in case he wanted to try styling his upper lip hair, tea-tree oil, and deodorant. Old Spice and Tom’s. Roll-on, stick, and spray. When she got home and dumped it all on his bed, Isao had laughed. Her husband, who was home for lunch, laughed too. “We already have some supplies,” he’d said, opening up the medicine cabinet in the hallway bathroom, and showing her a stick of Old Spice. There was an unopened Gillette razor in the cupboard under the sink. Why hadn’t they told her? “It’s a guy thing,” Isao had said. A guy thing? Not a mother thing?

*

The shaving items are still under the sink, just a few feet away. Someone should have thrown them out, she thinks. The presence of Isao’s possessions feels like coming home to a crime scene. She wants to get rid of it all. She wants to dump out his clothes, clear his room, delete all his photos. What purpose can his memory serve? Grief, that’s all.

Was the pain of the moment he’d been taken away enough to cancel out all of the joy of the seventeen years of his life? Enough, and more than enough. Watching him toss on the hospital bed, writhing in pain from a transfusion of the wrong blood, not knowing what the problem was, not knowing that the problem was stupid, a new nurse’s first and last mistake.

The memory of her son tossing and turning on the hospital bed becomes the memory of him burning up in his childhood bed from a bout of the flu on his ninth Christmas. It was her husband this time who’d panicked. He paced from room to room, calling up all his friends with children, calling up Isao’s doctor, tears standing in his eyes. “It’s so hard to see him in pain,” he said finally, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to Lulu. Lulu put her hand on Isao’s forehead. She felt then that her son’s pain was not and could never be a bad thing. Tossing and turning on the bed, sweating, nine-year old Isao was full of only life. Pain is life. He had been alive. Alive enough to rage at the smallest bug. Alive enough to eat his lunch at the wrong time just because he felt like it, alive enough to play basketball in the street and to shave without his mother knowing. Alive enough, on that worst of all days, for his whole body to revolt against the entrance of just a little bit of the wrong person’s blood, for him to thrash and protest and cry out, “Not me! Not here!” Until death, Lulu thinks sitting on the shower floor, it’s all life. Wet, lukewarm, lonely, raging life flowing from a spout to a drain like your own personal river.

“Lulu, we’re going to be late.”

This is what Lulu Mishima thinks about, crouching in the tub, while mourners start to gather at the Citizen’s Cemetery: her nine-year old boy burning up from the flu while outside the snow covers the neighborhood in pale embrace.

Fifty-five minutes in, the hot water has dulled to a tepid, weak flow. Lulu will be late for the funeral.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Eric Dovigi

I am a writer and musician living in Arizona. I write about weird specific emotions I feel. I didn't like high school. I eat out too much. I stand 5'11" in basketball shoes.

Twitter: @DovigiEric

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