Funerals Are for the Living

“You really shouldn’t have checked it.” 

Rosa’s voice is dripping with recrimination, and I’m eight years old again, looking up at her shadowed figure striking a superior pose. 

After the most stressful travel experience of my life, I don’t respond well.

“Yeah, right, it’s all my fault,” I snap back, crushing the papers provided by the crematorium in my fist. “Must be so hard being surrounded by idiots when you’re so perfect.”

A pleasant female voice above reminds the public to not leave any items unattended, and to inform security personnel of any suspicious baggage.

On the other end of the line my sister seethes. I silently dare her to join me and revert back to her fourteen year-old self. While the rational part of me understands that she’s also under enormous pressure as the primary mediator between us and dad’s family, that tone is like Pavlov’s bell and ignites a primitive part of my brain.

However, we’re adults now, and Rosa proves that hers is still more developed than mine. Leading with a heavy, self-regulating sigh, she tempers her tone. “Nevermind, Ben, let’s just focus on what we need to do. Did you get lunch yet?” There’s still a note of oldest-child condescension, but her shift to sensible action and care for my well-being walks me back from the brink of complete pettiness. 

“No,” I admit. Despite having eaten nothing today, background nausea prevents me from feeling any hunger. 

“Well, go and get something to eat. Who knows, maybe he made it, so let’s not freak out yet.” Nothing in her inflection indicates she has any hope of this. “Jason’s already on his way–we’ll figure something out.”

We hang up. I rub my eyes, my glasses riding up the bridge of my nose. Shame and panic cling to me like a phantom. I relive the sequence of stomach-dropping events from the past week: Rosa’s crying over the phone, cramming for midterms, four hours next to a crackhead on the Greyhound from Atlanta. The task of transport had fallen on me as the closest one to Nashville, but a mad sprint through the Denver airport had rendered all my hardships meaningless.

A granola bar and bottle of water costs me $6. I sit on a bench at the pick-up line and eat without relish, squinting at the bright Dallas afternoon, inhaling the black exhaust of passing cars. I think about broken plastic and glass scattering into a pool of alcohol-laced blood on asphalt, as witnessed by the angry eye of an unheeded stop light. 

“Thank God nobody else had been hurt,” Rosa had said on the phone between sobs. But I guess she wasn’t including the three of us.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. 

“Hey Benny! Nearly there.” Jason sounds characteristically energetic. “I heard we ran into a hitch?”

“Yeah–my flight out of Nashville got delayed and I nearly missed my layover. Looks like my bag didn’t make it.”

Jason laughs darkly. “Damn. Even dead, dad’s just trying to leave us. They gonna let us know when they find him?”

“Yeah.”

“The Renshaws are gonna be pissed. Maybe we should’ve listened to mom and stayed out of it. They could’ve figured out how to get him back on their own.” 

Even as he says it, we both know none of us could have let that happen, especially Rosa. She has the best memories of dad out of the three of us–and good little half-Asian kids that we are, we have a debt of filial piety to obey.

I pause to formulate my question diplomatically.

“How… have they been?”

“It’s been rough, not gonna lie. They’ve been especially rude to Rosa, even with everything she’s done. One of the uncles used the word ‘oriental’ earlier today. Didn’t know that was still in circulation.”

“Are you serious?” 

“Yep. Fun times. Oh, I think I see you–are you wearing blue?”

I look down at my Emory hoodie. “Yeah.”

“Hm.” 

“What?”

“I’m in the black Nissan. See ya in a bit.”

He pulls up and I get in the passenger’s seat. The rental has the new-car smell that I always associate with travel and impermanence. He claps my shoulder as I buckle in, and that’s when I notice it—that wild look in his eye, a recklessness that always made me scared and excited at the same time.

“Looking at your sad little face just made me think.” 

“What?”

“Why are we doing this? Who’s it for? Do any of us actually want to be here?”

The twist in my gut that I’d been feeling gives me a definitive no. “No, but we should–”

“Screw that,” Jason interjects. He signals and pulls us away from the curb. “Mom was right. We’ve done our part–the fact that dad missed the layover is a sign.”

I consider the upcoming weekend. We had made a silent pact to present ourselves and absorb every blow with grace. Rosa would be stiffer than usual, looking especially like mom with her glossy black hair and dark eyes. Jason, unable to euphemize any of his thoughts on the deceased, would be pinched and surly in his dark suit. I would be the third child in their shadows, struggling to muster a compelling show of grief for a man whose face I remember primarily from photos.

My tinted window forms the perfect frame for a plane taking off, its shining underbelly gloating as it eludes the pull of gravity, escaping for somewhere far from here.

“Yeah. Eff that.”

My brother elbows me conspiratorially, but I was always the easier one to win over. Possessed by a vision of an alternative future, we silently ponder the next steps. He hands me his phone. Connected to the speakers via bluetooth, the dial tone emanates around us.

“Hello?”

“I got Benjamin. We’re coming to pick you up. We’re going to Atlanta. Right now.”

A pause. “What the hell, Jason?” 

I think about the tortured itinerary that finally got me here, only for me to turn around and go straight back.

“We’ve been saying for ages we need to go visit him at school–he’s a senior now. These people don’t like us, and they never will. Dad’s not even here.”

And he never was. His unsaid words linger in the silence. 

I wait for that tone I had been subjected to less than an hour ago, telling him that he’s being selfish, thoughtless and unreasonable, that there’s no way we’re going to do that. But it doesn’t come.

Somewhere in Colorado, our father’s 15 pound brass urn is nestled in a nondescript black luggage, rotating on a conveyor belt eight hundred miles away from where his memorial is supposed to take place tomorrow. 

“Tell me–” Jason demands, “that you actually want to stay. You’ve done enough.” 

Tomorrow, somewhere in Mississippi, three adult children might be cutting their way across the southern United States, eating fistfuls of chips at a time, windows rolled down, radio pumping pop tunes. In the trunk, unworn funeral clothes form deep, unseemly creases. 

“Okay,” our big sister finally says, “I’ll grab our stuff. Let’s get out of here.”