The sun is bright today, brighter than it’s been for as long back as I can remember, at any rate. It’s hot too. The air is thick with the moisture of the last night’s dew, making it hard to breath. “Well, at least the wind’s blowing,” says someone nearly unknown. Someone: a distant relative who’s face I had seen only in photo albums and hanging on the walls of his house, now speaking to me as though our entire lives had been spent hand-in-hand at backyard picnics and neighborhood functions, as though our passions were linked and our ties had not been grossly neglected—there are so many someone’s here today. The wind is blowing, acting with just enough force to intimidate the heat into rushing against my face and around my body, serving only to increase the sensation that had overtaken me from the moment the news was delivered: claustrophobia, best I can discern. I’ve felt a growing sense of agitation at the constant presence of unwanted support; not the general annoyance one feels toward his nagging third cousins or his doting great aunt, but the deep, gnawing agitation of spirit, like what one experiences during a crisis the instant before full-blown panic sets in.
There are so many people here. To be honest, I didn’t think there would be a crowd better than fifty. I guess you never know how many friends someone really has. Not that a head count of the day’s attending would give even a nearly representative number relating to his number of friends. The more likely correlation could be drawn between the number of the attending and the number of those who held and therefore hold a decided socio-political agenda that was served by him in some form. Such a connection could not be severed now, not without damaging the overriding agenda, that is. Aside from the somewhat hushed voices of the unexpected masses, I could hear plainly the bustling of the highway and the surrounding city streets. The whole world was spinning, and it seemed like I could feel it turn. I could hear the music as I neared the majestically adorned double doors. It was a soft sound: an organ playing in concession with an assortment of strings. I didn’t recognize the piece.
There was a sudden blast of cool air-conditioned relief when I pulled open the doors. Stepping into the vestibule I saw four crimson colored walls covered from trim to trim with a most impressive display of artwork of a religious motif. Scenes from the bible – such as baby Jesus in his manger, the baptism of the Christ, the last supper, and of course, the crucifixion of the Son of God – were masterfully arranged in such a way as to supposedly elicit a deep and spiritual reaction; personally, I thought it was rather clichéd. The only lighting in the foyer came from the directional lamps positioned at an angle from the paintings, in order to draw attention toward them. I felt more comfortable outside in the heat. I heard the music suddenly stop and then start up again, though with a different affect: It was slower, longer in the notes and heaver on the deep end. I knew it would be my time soon.
Out of panic, I rushed into the nearby lavatory and gently closed the door behind me. The door was outfitted with an old-fashioned sliding-latch lock; not what you’d expect to see on doors these days. I secured it and turned around to be surprised by a stranger standing across the sink from me—a stranger standing where I was meant to be. He was a tall man, gangly, with one eye just a little wider than the other. I could tell his hair had once been a bold red and that, if not for the hand of time, it would be so even now; nevertheless, it was grey to spite him. There were cracks and creases carved into what may have once been granite skin, beautifully polished and well cared for; it rested loosely on the bone, showing straightforwardly the weight of gravity itself. I noticed his hands; obvious as it was that they were once strong and labor-ready on a whim, they were now not much more than brittle utensils, weather beaten and warped from ware and careless use. Then there were his eyes: once bright and filled with the nectar of youthful aspirations and ideologies, now those eyes were vacant, turned cold and dark; they’d become nothing more than an empty expanse, the depths of which, though once moist with the juice of naive dreams, were dried up, cracked and torn by the leaching influence of the outer worlds scorn. Not being able to stomach the sight of that man any longer, I turned out the light—and that man was gone.
I opened the door, having felt, at that moment, more willing to contend with the reality outside of that room than I was to do so with the reality that had just been born out of it.
The service had already started. To my dismay, I hadn’t quite missed all the Latin; at least that would’ve been something. So I sat quietly in the farthest back row I could find and pretended to be somewhere else for the next twenty minutes. Maybe I was on a beach with a book and only the sun, the waves and the birds to keep me company; maybe I was in the mountains, being subtly seduced by the sheer magnitude of this worlds beauty; maybe I was in a twenty-four foot travel trailer buried deep in the swamp land of Louisiana, being forced to marry a two hundred pound woman named Norma-Ray at the behest of her step-fathers twelve-gauge. Anything would’ve been an eagerly accepted alternative to the pompous blathering on behalf of an overeducated buffoon. Finally, and thankfully, just before I’d exhausted my imagination for escapes, the speech was over and it was my turn to speak in insipid, incoherent and completely exaggerated phrases designed and spoken for no other reason than to create a false sense of resolution in the hearts and minds of the ignorant and the willingly blind.
My speech was over. Now came the moment I was dreading the most; now came the reality that I feared I would be forced to face. As the music gained tempo and an octave or two, I made my way across the absurdly large dais, down the lavishly decorated steps and back across to the center of the room, directly in front of where I was speaking moments before. I looked down, and lying in front of me in an overpriced box constructed of fine woods and precious metals, was a man. He was the man that all these people had come to see, the man they either cared for or, more likely, were dependant on. He was an important man who laid there before me. A priest, he presided over the very church in which he was now being honored… remembered… exploited. He was shorter than I remembered, this man. And so frail and thin that I scarcely recognized him. But that was him; that was the man that chased monsters from underneath his son’s bed at night; who would lift that small, wiry boy up over his head with one arm and throw him into the air over their backyard swimming pool; who never cried a day in his life until the day his son graduated college. This was the man that I could never beat at a game of basketball, and always found a way to make me want to push harder, to fight longer, to be better than the next guy. He was my mentor when I was in college, my hero when I was in high school, my god when I was a child, and now, when something down in the deepest parts of me is screaming that I need him, that I will need him more than I ever have before, he’s nothing to me—nothing but a distant memory.
After the service, I walked back down the aisle, shaking the hands of half-false well-wishers and family I’d never met; doing my best to dodge the dowdy reverends dialectic attempts at providing consolation, I successfully made it to the vestibule and out the double-doors without having been accosted by any truly long-winded relatives or empathetic strangers. I started the walk to my car which was at the top of the hill about fifty-yards from the church building. Being the son of the deceased, it was my job – I mean privilege, of course – to ride “first car” in the precession. I walked briskly in an attempt to not draw any more attention to myself by holding up the line. By the time I got to my car I felt like I had run a hundred-yard dash. I was sweating, my back was hurting, my legs were cramping up, and I was breathing so hard that I thought I had suddenly developed a case of adult asthma. It’s amazing to think of how easy that trip would have been when I was young. With my hands on my knees, struggling for my next breath, I lifted my head toward my car and saw something in the window; it was him again, that same stranger, staring back into my eyes.
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