Five Stones Away

Uncle Paul wanted a funeral. Somehow, he ended up beside my mother.

Today was Uncle Paul’s funeral.

He looked better than he did the last time I saw him, which is one of those awful funeral things people say because it is true and sometimes it is just the only thing left to say. In this case, it was true. He looked peaceful. Or at least more peaceful than he had looked at the end, when dementia had stolen so much from him that even his face didn’t always seem like it belonged to him anymore. The last time I saw him, he had so many bruises from needles and IVs and whatever else they had done to keep his body going after his mind had already started slipping away.

Calvin had brought a Pinocchio T-shirt for him, Uncle Paul’s favorite, but he also brought a tie. Apparently the funeral home saw the tie and decided they would find a shirt to go with it, then put the Pinocchio shirt off to the side like a rejected costume option. That may have been Calvin’s rebellion. Fine, I’ll do the funeral nonsense, but he’s wearing a T-shirt. Uncle Paul probably wore a suit ten times in his entire 86-year life.

There was definitely evidence of stage makeup, though. The heavy pancake kind they used in the plays Uncle Paul directed at the high school. Calvin called it Plaster of Paris. He was not wrong.

Calvin hated the whole thing. Not Paul. Not honoring him. The thing itself. The viewing. The coffin. The priest. The whole machinery of death where everyone pretends this is normal and respectful and not completely insane that we put makeup on someone we loved and stand around pretending they are only sleeping and “look good.”

But Paul had wanted a funeral, so Calvin gave him one.

That is love, unfortunately. The annoying kind. The kind where you do the thing you hate because the person you loved wanted it and they are no longer here to argue with you or release you from it. I get it. If Patrick or Kara tells me, “This is what I want when I’m dead,” I’m doing it. Even if I hate it. Even if it makes no sense to me. Even if I risk life and limb, if you can’t do it for yourself, I will do it for you.

Calvin also wanted to keep it small and private. He knew if it went in the paper, there could have been a turnout of former students, and he didn’t want that. I understood. Uncle Paul had been the kind of teacher people remembered. Not vaguely, like, “Oh yes, I think I had him for English,” but fully. The kind of remembered that makes people write things like, “He made me feel like I wasn’t invisible,” forty or fifty years later on Facebook.

That one got me.

Because that was Uncle Paul. Dramatic, funny, theatrical, occasionally impossible, but also someone who could see a kid who felt invisible and make them feel like they were standing under a spotlight.

But today there was no spotlight. No auditorium. No former students lined up to tell stories. Just Calvin, Libby, Patrick, Kara, Gino, Rob, Maria, and me. A few neighbors came too. Mike and Purdy, and another neighbor from downstairs whose name we think was Dave. Dave came for sandwiches at Calvin’s afterward, which honestly, fair.

If there is a place that makes good food within a ten-mile radius, Calvin will find it. The sandwiches were ridiculous. Of course they were. Calvin does not do sad deli platters from the supermarket with curled-up roast beef and damp lettuce. Calvin finds the place Martha Stewart would recommend if you asked her. Then he also found these dulce de leche cookies, which were completely unnecessary and amazing. Butter cookies with caramel filling. Funeral cookies, apparently. I ate them like grief required it.

Maria was there and was so unusually non-narcissistic I felt like congratulating her. That sounds mean, but I was at a funeral, so I’m giving myself a pass. She even said we should use their pool when we told her we had rented one through Swimply, which was nice, technically. Except they have lived there for more than ten years and we were invited over once, about eight years ago, for a party. So sure. We will just casually start using your pool now in the summer of death and dementia.

Maria and Libby had a huge falling out a few years ago when Libby was moving into assisted living. Lib had to move out of the townhouse Rob bought for her, or at least got the mortgage on. She insisted on paying the mortgage as her rent. Anyway, they were getting ready to sell it. Libby had promised some of her things to people, and Maria was “helping,” which apparently meant giving Libby’s belongings away to get the place cleaned out.

Libby told her to get the fuck out of her house.

It did not go over well.

Libby didn’t get invited to things for quite a while after that and eventually had to apologize, even though she never really thought she was wrong, except maybe for the fuck part. But she wanted to see her grandson and be part of his life, so she swallowed her pride. We all tried to be generous about it at the time. Cleaning out a house is hard. Rob traveled a lot. Maybe Maria really was just trying to get the place cleared. Maybe she wasn’t giving away Libby’s things to her friends so much as trying to solve a problem quickly.

Maybe. Anyway, today Maria behaved.

The service itself was Catholic in the way these things are Catholic. A priest came and said prayers and sprinkled holy water and did the final rites or the graveside rites or whatever the official thing is called when everyone stands around a coffin and hopes the dead person is not offended by the ritual.

Calvin hated every minute.

I kept thinking, this is not what I want. Not that anyone asked me while we were actively burying Uncle Paul, but death makes people start planning, even if only defensively. I do not want this. I do not want a coffin. I do not want anyone trying to make me look alive after I have very clearly stopped being alive. I do not want people standing around whispering about how good I look.

I want the cheapest cremation available that does not involve a crime. Burn the body. Use whatever money would have gone toward a funeral for drinks and dinner instead. Tell stories. Good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones. Tell the one where I was right. Tell the one where I was a disaster. Tell the one where I said the thing everyone was thinking and then somehow I was the problem. Do not sit there and be sad for me in front of a box.

And please, for the love of God, do not wait until I’m dead to pray for me. I need prayers now. While I am still here. While I am still dealing with work and family and dogs and insurance companies and whatever fresh hell the universe has left in the queue. Pray now. After that, do whatever you want with the ashes.

It was a beautiful day, which felt rude and perfect at the same time. The sky was blue. The sun was shining. There was a breeze at the cemetery, the kind that saves a July day from becoming unbearable. It would have been hot without it. Instead it felt almost gentle, which made the whole thing worse somehow. A beautiful day for a burial. What an awful sentence to utter.

Calvin had found out only yesterday that Uncle Paul did not actually have a plot at the cemetery. He had thought he did. Everyone had thought he did. This is the kind of thing families think is handled until someone dies and suddenly it is very much not handled. So Calvin bought one. And somehow, in this huge cemetery, Uncle Paul’s new grave was maybe five stones away from my mother.

Five stones. I still cannot get over that.

When Dad gave me the plot next to my mother one Christmas, because apparently in our family cemetery plots can also double as holiday gifts, I had asked Calvin if maybe Uncle Paul should have it. This was when the dementia had just started. I didn’t want to upset Uncle Paul by bringing it up directly, and Calvin told me not to mention it.

Yesterday, when I found out Paul didn’t have a plot after all, I offered it again. The one next to my mother. But Calvin said it was done. He had already bought one. And then today there we were, standing in a cemetery big enough to lose entire branches of a family, and Uncle Paul was five stones away from Elle. My mother.

After the burial, I went to the cemetery office and asked a question I had not expected to be asking on the day we buried Uncle Paul. If Patrick and I are cremated, could we both be buried in the plot next to my mother?

The woman looked it up and said the plot had been bought in 1971. The year my mother died. Because of that, it was grandfathered in. We are allowed three additional people in that plot. Apparently they don’t even have to be cremated. I am not pretending to understand cemetery math, but I am not going to argue with it.

Dad and Kara have to agree to give it to me, since Kara is also an heir, and we need to have it notarized. We will deal with that when Dad comes up in September. One more strange requirement in the long file of being alive after people die.

After that, I went back to the graves. Or maybe I had never really left them. The office was just a detour, one more weird errand in the middle of a burial. Uncle Paul was still out there in the grass, five stones from my mother.

I knew exactly where my mother was. I knew where my grandparents were too, her parents. I walked right to them. My mother’s stone was covered with lichen. It was hard to read. Same with my grandparents’ stone. I may go back and clean them one day soon. Maybe when Uncle Paul’s stone is there. Maybe I will bring supplies and water and do something useful for the dead because sometimes that is easier than knowing what to do for the living.

We had brought orange roses for Uncle Paul, but they gave us roses to put on his coffin, so we had extra. We put some on my mother’s grave and some on my grandparents’ grave.

They are all together now. Or at least their earthly bodies are. That is what I say without pretending I understand anything.

Kara told me later that when she was putting the orange roses on our mother’s grave, she heard a female voice say, “My strong girl.” She was freaked out. Of course she was. She told me this after asking me to please get her a bottle of wine when I stopped to get some for Calvin, which also felt right. A possible message from beyond, followed immediately by Prosecco intervention. Yup. That is my family.

We went back to Calvin’s and ate sandwiches and cookies and told stories. Calvin said Uncle Paul has a lot of writings. I want to read all of them. He has scrapbooks too. In the winter, we are supposed to go through everything, assuming Calvin doesn’t decide to move before then or the universe doesn’t decide we need another subplot.

I’m glad Libby was able to get there. I’m glad we were there. I’m glad Uncle Paul got the funeral he wanted, even if Calvin hated it and even if I was standing there mentally pricing out direct cremation.

Near the end, Purdy told me Uncle Paul had been saying “Elle.” My mother’s name. I keep thinking about that. Maybe dementia loosened something. Maybe the past came forward because the present had become too hard to hold. Maybe he was just calling out a name from childhood, from family, from some room in his mind where she was still alive and young and laughing.

Or maybe she came for him.

I hope she did. I hope Elle was there waiting. I hope Grandma and Grandpa were there too. Uncle Mike. Uncle Dennis. Kevin, finally part of the family instead of the silence. I hope Tags was there, because obviously the dog should be there. I hope the whole strange, broken, beautiful family was waiting somewhere just beyond the cemetery breeze.

I hope Uncle Paul knows how much he was loved. I hope he knows he was not invisible.

And I hope, wherever he is, someone handed him a script, turned up the lights, and let him direct the whole damn thing.