"you know the way, right?" They said it after I got out of the car. Some family-friends I didn't recognize in the moment. Hands were shaken. I might have hugged some of them. The cemetery loomed to our right, and yes, I did know the way to the funeral-hall, but still it seemed like a horrible thing to say to a person. I would have preferred not to know the way.
Walking up towards the cloistered building felt like time compressing in front of me. Pushing the stencil of a sealed syringe all the way to the end and building temporal pressure. Turns out you can't get rid of the stuff still in between you and death, but you can get close in physical space if you push hard enough.
"You know the way, right?" Death waits straight ahead. Always straight ahead. The angle is 180°. The dead angle. I'd been thinking that the entire drive, because buses in my home town near the French border have a sticker on the side warning of their “angle mort” their dead angle, which is to say the vehicular blind spot. The real blind-spot isn't straight ahead of course in any non-metaphorical way, but the phrase still ricocheted off of everything. Death had turned every thought into a palimpsest of memories, which was probably what funerals were all about.
Inside the hall were chairs, flowers, people all mourning in their own distinct ways, which I didn't have access to directly, but which squeezed themselves in through my pores under the time pressure. Then, there was the box. Solitary, central, crystalline. Its angles somehow sharper – its outline clearer than the rest of reality, like a diamond forged from crushed moments. Like a metaphor for itself. Pearl white on its pedestal with a picture of you in front of it. A coffin of course, but my head insisted on calling it “the box”. How’d you get in that box? Why? When? They were entirely nonsensical trains of thought, but this fact did nothing to derail them.
There was a day on the beach when we made sandcastles with a coconut shell. You said it looked like a nuclear power plant, and that didn’t seem right at all, not even at the time, but we just played along. Only later did I realize that you were probably thinking of the dome over Chernobyl, and even that only bears resemblance from a certain angle. No matter. The fact that it’s a nonsensical train of thought does nothing to derail it. I was wondering how you got in that box in the same way in which the sandcastle looked like a nuclear power plant. Somehow the memory felt like a snapshot from a previous life, as though change of that sort were impossible in this one. “The inability to deal with death is just a malignant outgrowth of object permanence” chimed some disconnected part of me. “Cool theory smart-ass. If I believe that then why the fuck am I crying?” I didn't know what to say to that.
The sermon spoke of trees and how their roots hold each other in place, but then it also spoke about how there was “no rational reason to be here”, trying to spin it as inherently spiritual, when there were many, so many reasons to be here, because emotion is not irrational. The idea that absence would be sane was wrong and an insult, but my attention was pearling off the speech’s surface too much to get truly upset. I had entered a staring contest with your portrait, tying to figure out who could avoid tearing up for longer. You won. Remember when we used to have staring contests? I guess you don’t, but I do.
The white rose, one of which had been given to everyone, was slowly spinning between my fingers. I was surprised that it didn’t have thorns. At points I would have liked to clench it and feel pain, but then I was also happy to not be distracted by anything so trivial as a thorny rose. I was already getting distracted by how you got in that box.
My brother was upset by how afterlife-y the sermon was. I didn't mind. You were very afterlife-y after all. Your death, your metaphysics. One line stuck out though. He claimed we were bidding adieu to your body today, but that your soul would forever live on, which felt surreal. For a moment I thought he had gotten it backwards. I know this was probably the way in which you would have thought about it too, but I couldn't even attempt to get myself into the associated mind space, and hearing it spoken made that obvious. We had to part with you – the you that really is you – last week. The thing we still have – the thing that will linger – is the physical form, right? That's what persists, what we don't have to part with, what we keep in the box. Your body will stay in place where we can get to it, just like death. We will come and we’ll visit it every so often, right here, some meters over, and we’ll think of the soul that is now gone.
Maybe I had lost time or maybe time had lost us, because suddenly six men had gathered around the box and the speaker had fallen quiet. "show’s over, time to pack up" he didn’t say, but he might as well have. They didn't even really do much besides move some flowers out of the way but it felt like the entire scene was falling apart. Must have already prepared to leave. You prepared to leave, didn’t you? Mom told us about it in the car: how you had put everything out on the table in your apartment. Papers, money, cut-outs of obituaries as a not-so-subtle hint. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that you closed the coffin’s lid behind yourself... Is that how you got into the box? Perhaps. Either way, we followed it towards the sliding door that constituted our exit and all that compressed time became noticeable again. This was the end of the syringe. Here and no further...
But death let us through, somehow. I was genuinely surprised that the door allowed me to pass, as I was certain the membrane would hold, but it gave way without the slightest resistance. My visa had been granted. The pressure was gone too, or maybe it had simply ruptured my eardrums, rendering me unable to feel it. I didn't so much hear the bells by that point as much as I knew they were happening in some adjacent realm. Someone was playing the trumpet next to you. He later introduced himself as though we knew each other, so I might have known him, but I didn’t. Everything was alien. His song was strange. As we walked with the box it meandered along, and I could hear my aunt sobbing behind me. Desperately I wanted to turn around and maybe hug her or somehow do something, but the fear that object-permanence would fail me again was too great. I couldn't rip my eyes from your box. Who knew where you might end up if the box wasn’t looked at.
Midway it occurred to me that the tune they were playing might have been trying to be happy, and that idea was absolutely mind blowing. Death didn't know how to play happy music, so it failed in the same way in which a sunset fails to be a particularly good omelette. I appreciated the effort, even though I didn't understand it.
In retrospect, the pastor had only mentioned that you wanted to die once, and he had looked incredibly uncomfortable doing so. You never mentioned that you wanted to die. Never in words. You didn’t say it when I last saw you, though you did say that you didn’t want to live any longer and you had made significant efforts to achieve that end without ever admitting it to yourself. I’m sure you didn’t say it on other occasions as well. And now he didn’t want to admit it either. As though the person we were commemorating needed to be white-washed. As though your memory needed to be corrupted before it had even begun to fade. You wanted to die. You put all your things on that table. You closed the casket behind you… It’s alright. Rest.
The word echoed as they manoeuvred the box into place and we threw our roses upon it. Inside you were holding some shells we found for you at the beach, looking up into nowhere. You always used to look into nowhere. You’d grow silent and stare at something invisible. When we last talked, you described your own grave and there was a serenity on your face as though you were describing a vacation you looked forward to. White stone and quiet. Looking away, drifting off to somewhere. I hope you got to that place.