Funeral Story
They didn’t need to cut my dad’s hair for the wake when he died. He actually got a haircut just a few hours before he came crashing down on the kitchen floor with a heart attack. It was a cheap haircut, but I bet a cheap barber gives a better haircut than the best undertaker.
I found his clean-cut demise to be fitting, because overall, him dying was a very formal affair. Very formal and foreign.
The wake was nice, in a pretty building in Yarmouth. A ton of people were there. Like my friends. But it was weird. Because my dad was just laying in the most obvious place in the room and his skin looked gross.That was embarrassing. I remember my mom kissed him one last time before the end of the night. I was so disgusted, because again, he looked horrendous.
Then a couple days later, on the ride to the funeral, I was in the nicest car I’d ever been in. It wasn’t our car, it was a limo. But I was wearing a bunch of uncomfortable clothes that didn’t make any sense, so that detracted from the experience. We went to a church and I had no idea what to do with my body. I just kept flapping my lips up and down tiredly and getting on my knees whenever anybody else did. There were a bunch of my dad’s really trashy asshole siblings there. He came from this big Portuguese family with thirteen kids. They were all so obnoxious. After the service where everybody cried, my dad’s siblings kept touching my arms and telling me how I looked exactly like him.
So they were done singing and talking about God which I didn’t get at all, and we went to the graveyard where they would finally put my dad’s box in the ground. But then they started talking about God even more. Next to a big hole in the ground there were these huge young men in beautiful suits with hats and guns and they were the ones who lowered my dad into the ground. As they did that, the priest read this prayer about “the Lord is my shepherd” and stuff. And everybody but me and my sisters knew when to say, “the Lord is my shepherd.”
The only instance in which I could remember hearing about a shepherd was Shepherd’s Pie. It made me feel uncomfortable to acknowledge a thin connection between my dead dad and food. I looked around at everybody really scared but nobody else seemed scared by the talk of shepherds.
Then when they were finally done going on and on about all that crap, the priest who was reading the prayer came over to me and told me to look after my sisters and my mother. I looked at him and wanted to ask him how, but I didn’t want to put him on the spot or take up his time.
Then when we were finished saying goodbye to all of these family I didn’t know, we went in my mom’s brother’s car and got Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins. And that made me feel like I knew what was going on. So I got to cry.
And everything started to slowly make a little bit of sense. More sense, at least.