Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(61)

“There’s no reason my life shouldn’t end by the hands of a Russian,” I told little Teddy, as I looked out the window at the bleak New Jersey landscape. “That would make the most sense for me at this current point in time. That would be a complete 360.” We stopped at a 7-Eleven, and Teddy and I went inside to fill up on candy that he could devour before we arrived back at Glen’s home, which everyone in our family refers to as the Russian embassy.

I was leaving for Bali the next day and asked Glen what the protocol was if my dad died while I was halfway around the world.

    “Well, typically, Chelsea, people come home for their father’s funeral.”

“Copy that,” I told him, and turned up the music.



* * *



? ? ?

I told Dan that I didn’t want people calling and telling me how sorry they were about my dad, because I still had a hard time accepting any pity. Especially now, since I wasn’t even that torn up about it.

“It just feels fraudulent.”

“Will there be a funeral?” Dan asked me.

“It’s this Sunday, in New Jersey. We’re keeping it low-key.”

“Okay, so, just so you know,” Dan explained to me, in a very kindergarten-teacher kind of way, “things may come up for you when you go home.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, you can call me anytime if you need to talk.”

I couldn’t imagine myself calling Dan from my father’s funeral, but I appreciated the crossing of boundaries. Crossing boundaries meant love.



* * *



? ? ?

My dad’s funeral was one of those instances when you’re reminded of what it means to show up for people. The tradition. The absolute wretched grayness of a day like that. Why do people show up—if not out of decency, and tradition?

There were maybe thirty of us, all related in one way or another, gathered at his grave on a cold fall day in New Jersey. Everyone reminisced about what a character he was, how he had such a huge personality, and they all talked about how much he loved my mother. Your father was so in love with Ritala. “Ritala” was the moniker my father gave to my mother, in that singsong kind of way they talked when they were flirting with each other, or when they were being playful with us. Every person at the funeral also sang her name the way my father always did. “Ri-ta-la.”

    It was as pleasant a funeral as I could have ever imagined for my father. I talked to his cousins and other relatives who had known him his whole life, and was reminded that he had a life before I came into it. His cousin Jerry had seen him two weeks earlier at his nursing home, and had brought him a corned beef sandwich. I thanked her for doing that and then realized how strange it was for me to thank her for spending time with the cousin she had known long before I came on the scene. I asked her what it was like to grow up with him.

“Well, his mother was crazy,” said Jerry, who’d grown up across the street from him. “She must have been bipolar, or something. Your dad was the baby, and she spoiled him rotten. All the girls on Tracy Avenue loved Seymour.”

Another cousin, Linda, said my dad was the first person to the hospital when she was sick with cancer. That he visited her repeatedly, and would stay for hours. Her daughter told me he was the first person to the hospital when she had a baby. Linda told me about a time ten years earlier when my dad had picked up her sister and her to go to lunch. She said that he pulled over on the side of the road to urinate, and that she and her sister were appalled.

“After your mom died, that was it for him,” she said. I wanted to tell her that my dad had been urinating on the side of the road long before my mother died, but reminded myself I no longer needed to button every conversation with something funny. I reminded myself to sit, and listen, and not fill the air up with noise just because someone else stopped talking.

    Glen gave a eulogy. He had done this at Chet’s funeral and at my mom’s funeral, but this was the one he had the most difficult time getting through. I had never seen Glen become so undone; he is usually stoic and filled to the brim with sarcasm, so it was painful to see him struggling, and I wondered what it meant for him—all the memories he had of my father that I didn’t know about.

When everyone was done speaking, Roy, Glen, Simone, Shana, and I were staring over my mom’s and Chet’s headstones and my dad’s freshly dug grave.

Five against three. The next person who dies, we’ll be even.

Even in death, I was keeping score.

That’s when I caught myself. Stop.



* * *



? ? ?

I reminded myself to focus not on the end of someone’s life but on the whole, and to look at my dad’s life the way he would want me to see it.

My sisters had put together photo albums of my dad when he was young. Pictures of him as a baby, as a teenager, of him traveling through Europe, or living in Mexico, where he dreamed of becoming a writer. As a young father, always with that great big smile and waving with his great big hands. A reminder to never stop smiling, to hold on to happiness, and to find joy. To always wag your tail. Be playful. To live life with your leg kicked out.

    The funeral was a reminder to look for the youth in a person, rather than their age. To look at their hopes and dreams, and the family they created, and their best moments with that family. To see them when they were filled with hope—not when the rug was pulled out from under them. To remember that death should be a reminder of all the memories of that person at their best, and the best private moments you shared with that person. All the stories and the photographs painted a picture of my father I hadn’t known. Why did I seem surprised at the amount of time he spent with the boys and the pictures of all their road trips and summers on the beach? I had those moments with him too—something I had seemed to have let dim in memory, replaced by yelling and fighting, and all the times when we were broke or he hadn’t sold a car in months, or the times my mother had to work because he had zero financial stability. (Another example of unconscious privilege—assuming that mothers shouldn’t have to work.) There were also good things to hold on to, yet I had been choosing to let the bad outweigh the good and judge someone by how they behaved when they were at their lowest.