Again I was asked what Mom would have wanted, and again I was relieved to have the answer. She loved peach roses, although only gerbera daisies—not exactly funeral appropriate—were available in peach on such short notice. The adults indulged me and ordered them. In a way, it seemed fitting that the funeral of such a young person would be full of innocent, springtime flowers, and their pale petals would complement her hair. I felt so grown up, speaking on her behalf, carrying out her wishes. I wanted to make her proud by doing everything right, as though she had left me in charge until she returned.
Afterwards, Gwen and Glenice and I went to Grammy’s house, where Carol was waiting with a brochure of tombstones. I had less influence here—they selected a pink granite stone shaped like a heart, which I considered too sentimental and pretty. The pink heart was meant for a calmer death, someone who had wasted away with a chronic disease or died of old age, someone who had time to say goodbye. Someone who died in a bed, in their clothes, surrounded by love and eased away with the support of machines. I didn’t want everything dressed up and made pretty. If I’d had my choice, the stone would have been hard and dark like the death: an angular chunk of polished black marble, or a tall, sharp obelisk piercing the sky. I hated the idea of an unassuming pink thing sitting in a line with all the other stones—well behaved, decorative. Undistinguished.
And then there was talk of caskets, which confused me. It turned out that cremation did not preclude a viewing. I wanted to protest. Hadn’t Mom wanted to be cremated so no one could stare at her dead body? But maybe it had just been about not lying in a box in the ground—she had such intense claustrophobia, I think she could have projected it forward even into death. I felt like Dennis would know the answer, but of course I couldn’t ask him. Nor could I ask Tim or Dale or my father. I could not risk speaking to any suspects for any reason.
I didn’t know exactly why Mom had wanted to be cremated, so I kept my mouth shut. I remember those around me talking about “saying goodbye,” which seemed to me just more gentle sentimentality. I had no interest in seeing her. I wanted to tell these people that seeing her dead wouldn’t help. I wanted to tell them how unlikely it was that any mortician could get her into viewing shape. But I held back. I didn’t want to horrify them. I was learning that there were silences now, unbridgeable spaces between myself and those around me.
Now, I step carefully into the subject of Mom’s funeral, asking Glenice just who made the decision to put Mom’s body on view. “That’s what you wanted,” she says. “You wanted to say goodbye. I didn’t want to see her that way—it was terrible. I’ve never gotten over it.” When I protest, sure that I’d wanted Mom cleanly burned rather than revealed, she says, “Well, maybe Wendall decided. I don’t really know.” This sort of tragic miscommunication would happen again and again over the years, warping our love in ways we couldn’t even see.
A few days after that initial cautious foray, I call Glenice again. I press further and discover that she and others viewed Mom’s body at the funeral home, before the morticians did their work. I am stunned by this, cannot bear to ask any more about it, still have no idea what purpose this viewing was meant to serve. I think about my conviction in those days that I knew more than they did about everything, that they had been protected from what I had seen. I feel foolish, ungenerous, hard. But then Glenice says, “I didn’t want you to see her like that,” and I feel the old anger: I already had seen her like that. Why is this so easy for them to forget? Their wishful amnesia may come from a place of love, but it makes me feel terribly alone.
* * *
The funeral was held four days after the murder, exactly one week after Mother’s Day. To say it was sunny is an understatement. The spring day that came to receive such sadness and anger from so many people was flawless. It was bright but not hot. The sky was blue—placidly, perfectly blue, the sort of blue that seems to vibrate and pull you up with its boundless energy. It was an expensive blue, like a chip from an ancient vase, like a jewel full of deep light. I kept looking up at it, to check that it was really there. It was impossible that the beauty of that sky had survived that night.
Gwen and Glenice had not yet made that trip to the house, as it was still an active crime scene. So Gwen lent me a dress—bright and flowing, with large purple flowers and a lace collar. At first I fretted that it wasn’t black, but Gwen assured me that wearing black to a funeral was just an old-fashioned custom, not really a strict rule anymore. That I looked pretty.
That morning, I stood in front of Grammy’s house, surrounded by the handful of family who had gathered there, and peered at my grandmother as she held a flat little camera like Mom’s, feet planted, bent forward at the waist, diligently recording the moment. I wore an uncertain smile, confused about why we were taking a photograph at all. Everyone turned out blurry.
We arrived at the funeral home early, and I went to sit on a bench on the lawn. My friend Vicki soon came and sat with me. I remember talking very fast while watching wind blow through green leaves. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m just not really feeling anything at the moment.” She did me the kindness of just sitting quietly, nodding occasionally to show she was listening. I felt scary and strange, but she just watched the leaves with me, until Gwen came and walked me inside.
There was time in the beginning for each of us to view the body privately. Gwen and I would go in first, even though I didn’t really want to see Mom. Her body had been made into evidence, then was cleaned up and sewn back together, and now we were supposed to say goodbye to her through it—the ritual was absurd, but there was no escaping. I knew I would have to see her during the funeral, knew we’d be front row and center, and I wanted to prepare myself. I did not want to wail in front of a roomful of people.
Gwen and I entered the room, and as I looked down the long row of folding wooden chairs I thought, There she is. For the second time, I walked slowly toward her. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was playing—the adagio sostenuto—each high note like a needle sent to pierce my calm, the low notes drawn out and relentless, dragging me inexorably along like my own stubborn heartbeats. The song would haunt me forever, would stop me cold when I heard it in movies or on elevators, or while trapped on hold with customer service. This song, and the beeping of a phone off the hook, will forever hit me from my blind spot.
Mom didn’t look a whole lot like herself, and that made the looking a little easier; it was her and not her. But there was a sadness to her disguise: They had put so much makeup on her face that you could hardly see her freckles. And worse than that, her hair had become thin and threadlike, a cloud of pinkish cotton wool instead of her thick golden-red waves. The anchor of her beauty had been ruined, and her face was a stranger’s.