Your father's death—despite a three-year battle with cancer—will hit you like a fist to the back of the neck. Mental preparation will fail you. This is normal. Really. The arrangements you'll make are laid out in tight, tiny script. He was like that: forward-thinking, temperate.
"Don't forget to book the bagpiper."
At the viewing, you'll walk smack into Uncle Eddie and keep going, unaware. People whose names you don't know will know yours. They'll smile pityingly as you crumple into chairs, offer to bring you cake and tea. They'll look elsewhere while you stare down at the body in the casket.
Make sure to nod when your second cousin Rona repeats those tired, idiotic words, "He looks real good." She doesn't see that the cake of orange goop across his face is sick—makes him look like a skeletal Oompa-Loompa.
Accept all pats on your shoulder as well-meaning.
When you finally get a moment alone—in the ladies' room, say, or behind the funeral home to sneak a cigarette—reassure yourself: These things happen. People die all the time. Really. Former Presidents die. So, too, do elementary school teachers, strippers, and architects. Everybody dies.
Even fathers. Even yours.
4 comments:
It's the beginning of your next novel, Jen! Or novella. Or short story. I think that's what drives me nuts about writing drabbles of my own-- I can't help but look at them as beginnings once they're written down, and then when I try to go on I get immediately stuck. :D
It's funny because it's true: at my grandpap's funeral the other weekend, I didn't recognise my cousin and said "nice to meet you." In my defense, I hadn't seen him for fifteen years, or something like. But still! I hope to God he didn't quite hear me (I was mumbling a bit, and the funeral home muzak was a bit louder than it should have been), so that when I claim I actually said nice to see you," it seems plausible.
Weddings, funerals, and family reunions--you always get stuck on names of people who somehow seem to have remembered yours.
This actually did begin life as the first page of what was going to be a short story, and I wrote the draft about five years ago. I found it in the filing cabinet the other day, and thought it might be fun to rewrite it as a micro piece.
"I can't help but look at them as beginnings once they're written down, and then when I try to go on I get immediately stuck. :D"
I thought they'd work well as a way to preserve a scene for a longer piece, but I don't have any interest (right now) in developing the ones I've written into full stories. Maybe later? It's like my brain thinks they're somehow completed already and behaves as if I'm asking it to write the same story all over again. It's weird.
They work as saynettes too.
This is an excellent snapshot.
Thanks, Nathalie!
I had to Google "saynette," and now I know I new word! Yay for expanding vocabulary! :) You're right--this one in particular does seem like more of a saynette.
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