Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  “So,” Marie admonishes her as she takes a curve way too fast, “don’t worry. With this group you could probably regear a jet, turn a hotel inside out and come up with a spare toothbrush, enough Tampax to supply an Army brigade, and coupons for free oil changes. There’s bound to be something, there always is. Stop worrying. It will work out.”

  Katherine cannot stop worrying. What if something happens at work? What if her daughter needs her? What if she discovers something on the trip that is a huge secret that Annie has kept hidden from the rest of the world? What if, in spite of all of the good intentions, one of the women turns out to be a total pain in the ass? What if there is a glitch in Annie’s plan?

  “Stop it,” Marie says, reading her mind. “You’ve thrown enough guilt into the wind to last a lifetime. Don’t forget Annie wanted you to have a good time and toss her ashes into the wind.”

  “Oh, that.”

  They discuss the first leg of the trip—the ominous and pending initial flight to New Mexico. The drive after that in an already-too-small Jeep toward Santa Fe. The drive west from beyond the other side of Albuquerque to a place neither of them can remember or pronounce. A hike on a trail that right now might as well be in the Amazon. Marie explains the terminal complications of her next two patients and shares an update on her daughter’s spring dance dress ensemble and then they talk about how glad they are to know each other.

  “Marie, you are remarkable.”

  “Wait until I show up and start bossing everyone around. You may never speak to me again.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m moving in. I hear you have a vacancy coming up what with one of your twenty-one daughters off to college and all,” Katherine banters back.

  “Baby, this is wonderful news. She cleans the downstairs bathroom.”

  “On second thought, I’m canceling this cell phone service.”

  Katherine glances at her watch. Ten minutes until the official funeral, minus the hours of planning and worrying and racing around trying to connect the women in Annie’s life.

  “Marie, when can you call back? Do you really think you can make it to Florida or New York?”

  “Depends on what I find under Jessie’s shirt and behind Bob’s feeding tube. I’m trying, Katherine. I want to be there.”

  Katherine has imagined Marie’s life beyond their phone calls, the insanity—so she thinks—of all the dying, all the loss, and mingling that with the living she must do with her own family and her own life. It is not the physicalness of her life’s work, the bandages and tubes and the obvious evidence of the demise of skin and bones and limbs and organs on the inside that you cannot see but that you can feel melting away centimeter by centimeter. It is not the way, day by day, she sees the skin shrink and the body begin to curl into positions fetal and birthlike. It’s not what you might find with the woman who refuses to move for five days in a row. It is not the slow wail that starts as a whisper and then moves through the throat of a patient who can no longer summon words to express the degree of pain, the way it feels as if someone is standing on her shoulders with an ax and hammering it into the center of her chest—at that perfect spot between her two breasts. It is not that. Not at all.

  It’s the pressure on Marie’s heart.

  “How in the world do you do it, Marie?” she’s already asked her a dozen times in the past week. “How do you keep standing upright?”

  Marie knows how she does it and she explains it as if she is reciting a poem, as if she has died herself and seen something unlikely and yet terribly beautiful just as she crosses over the boulder of burden and sacrifice into the river of light and color.

  “It is my call to life,” she tells Katherine. “It is my gift and to ignore it, to walk away from the rising passion that needs to be emptied out of me with each patient and then refilled with the next, well, that would be my call to dying.”

  Katherine tries to imagine her work as the assistant district attorney as her own call to life. Mostly for the past several years it has been her ball and chain, the way she pays for the mortgage and a way to get health insurance. The legal lines under the nerves in her head have become dull and stagnant by what she sees as the ridiculous rules of life and justice that often result in no justice at all.

  No justice for the woman she represented who was blinded by an ex-husband who kept her locked in the trunk of his car for three days and then bashed in her head with a baseball bat. No justice for at least three men she knows who were in prison for crimes they did not commit. No justice for all the kids she had to send to juvenile jail who maybe just needed a warm meal, someone to say something to them besides “fuck you,” and no justice for the helplessness she often feels when there is nothing she can do, absolutely nothing she can do.

  When Katherine thinks like this, she realizes that there is a heavy hand on her heart. When she stops to think about her life, closes her eyes and tilts her head back in the terribly uncomfortable office chair that does not accommodate her long legs, the length of her five-foot-ten-inch frame, what she realizes is that she is on automatic pilot and that perhaps it is only the speed of light, the direction of her travel, the air that is holding her up. Perhaps she needs a change.

  While Marie hangs up and tends to her dying patients, Katherine waits in the bar for the rest of the funeral procession members to arrive and she tries to imagine what would bring her passion at this point in her life—excluding, of course, the magic hands of her lover Alex and that first sip of wine after a twelve-hour day. What would she do if she erased every mark in her overworked Palm Pilot? If she cleared through the trash of her timetables, what would really be left?

  “I’m stumped,” she tells herself out loud as a school group on an airport tour parades past her making more noise than the airplane she will board in two hours and she turns just in time to see the bartender balancing something on her head. “What’s become of me?” Katherine asks, putting her own head in her hands and laughing. “Airport bars. Waiting for a traveling funeral to begin, kids in jeans trying to see who can make the loudest burp. This is living.”

  She says this with a smile and with the budding hope that something she has missed, something she may have forgotten, something she desperately wants to see again is just behind her left shoulder. Katherine thinks of her mother for a moment, how the simple routines of her mother’s life were the grounding points that kept her balanced. How her days unfolded in seemingly uneventful moments—waking her children, making breakfast, volunteering in the school library, staying up until Katherine waltzed in at one A.M., which was two hours past curfew, folding towels while she watched the noon news, driving to the city to have lunch with her father twice a week, balancing a checkbook on one fairly modest income. The routine of her mother’s life had always mystified Katherine.

  Once, when Katherine had been particularly snotty about how other mothers had real jobs and how she would never be caught dead ironing a man’s shirts or how her life would have much more meaning than scrubbing floors every Friday morning, her mother sent her to her room and then summoned her out an hour later with something that Katherine still considers remarkable but surely did not at the moment it was happening.

  “Sit down,” her mother ordered after she led her back to the kitchen table. “Sit down, Katherine, and listen.”

  Katherine listened. She listened while her mother told her that the kitchen table was her office desk and that everything she saw in the house was her business territory. She listened while her mother rolled out a piece of paper that was her associate’s degree from the local business college and she listened when her mother talked about life choices and how everyone’s call to service was different.

  “My mother was a drunk,” Katherine heard her mother say. This was something so distant from what she had been led to believe about her grandmother that she dared not breathe. “I never told you this. I never told you how she locked me in my room and how I saw her crawling across the floor spattered with vomit or ho
w I never once when I was a little girl had a hot meal, or clean clothes to wear, or someone to hold my hand and read me a story at night.”

  Katherine remembers crying softly during the telling of this story so that she would not make a sound, so that her mother would go on and unwrap the secret that she had kept locked inside of herself for such a long time.

  “Once,” her mother told her, looking out the window that was above the kitchen sink, “once when I was locked in my room by an outside bolt that she had installed during a brief moment of sobriety, I heard my parents fighting and I stood on top of my dresser. I looked out my bedroom window and I saw our neighbor holding her daughter and twirling her in circles in the side yard. I saw that the little girl had on a new jacket and that her hair was braided and that her mother couldn’t stop smiling. Her mother was smiling and I dropped from the dresser into my bed of dirty sheets and I cried for so long that my eyes swelled shut.”

  Katherine sat still and silent when her mother then produced a resumé. It was handwritten. It was precise. It was a listing of all the skills her mother needed to run a house, to manage a family, to perfect a budget, to steer a ship through the shoals of childhood and adolescence and into the harbor of adulthood. When she was done reading off her list of developed skills—financial manager, career counselor, strategic planner, literary assistant, chef, time-management specialist—Katherine heard something that continued to ring in her ears even at the San Francisco airport as she was embarking on her first-ever traveling funeral.

  “I just want to be a good mother,” she told Katherine, holding on to both her hands in a way that would have hurt at any other moment. “I want to show you how love can mean everything, how the comforts of a home where you are safe and where kindness matters above everything else are what really is most important. I don’t want you to have to worry about how you will look when you go to school, what it will be like when you come home, how your friends will feel to know how you live. I want you to be happy. I love you, Katherine. I love you with a fierceness that is the driving force of everything I do. I am a mother. That is my job and my legacy and whatever you choose to do, whoever you become, make certain that you can put your hand right there, right on your chest and feel the flames of the fire of life’s passion that will change direction, surely change direction but will never go out.”

  Katherine has both hands pressed against her chest, feeling for the fire, when she feels a tap on her arm. When she turns, Dr. Jill Jacobs Matchney is standing at attention by the airport bar table that is decorated in a color that can only be described as something close to what you might see after sampling the delights of a tequila commercial. Dr. Jill has on hiking shorts, a T-shirt that says, Why eat when you can read? a baseball hat and a pair of red, high-topped sneakers just like the ones now cradling the ashes of Annie G. Freeman. She is a wispy, thin woman with hair the color of dark sand. Jill looks kind but stern.

  “Jill.”

  “Oh, Katherine.”

  The women embrace and there is a mixture of laughter and tears for what they are about to begin, for what they already know, for the places they are about to examine. They could also be tears of fear for the uncertainty of this moment and the ones that are coming up right behind it.

  “You look fabulous,” Katherine tells her, leaning back and holding on to her shoulders. “The sneakers are a nice touch.”

  “I thought they were mandatory. It’s about all Annie ever wore. I can see why she wanted to be flung around the country from inside those things.”

  Katherine, Jill, Laura, Rebecca and Marie have all talked often during the past week. All five have exchanged phone numbers and bits and pieces of their lives as they scrambled to do Annie’s bidding. They have all confessed uncertainty. They have all hinted with a quick laugh or a loud sigh about the difficulties of arranging and rearranging lives for days and days when sometimes rearranging a minute is as impossible as bringing Annie back to life. They have made no pacts or promises beyond the commitment to be part of the traveling funeral and by participating, agreeing without saying a word, to splitting their hearts into pieces to do what you do at funerals—grieve and celebrate.

  “This is something,” Jill confesses as she sits down and orders her own Bloody Mary. “I’ve never thought of a funeral as fun before and I sure as heck can use a little fun these days.”

  “My father used to say that a change is as good as a rest,” Katherine responds, leaning in to take a bite out of the pickle that is attached to her own drink that looks more like a garden than a beverage. “You’ve had a lot of changes in your life this past year and sometimes a distraction is a good way to push through things.”

  “And what a distraction this is,” Jill says, laughing. “I need this distraction. I do.”

  Katherine leans across the table, touches Jill’s hand and says, “Welcome aboard.”

  There is that second and ten more after it when Jill sizes up Katherine and Katherine sizes up Jill and they wonder how far they will charge into each other’s lives. They wonder if one of them will whine too much, if one of them takes a long shower or has to spend too much time in the bathroom in the morning or has some unsolved crisis that will annouce itself during lunch one day and startle onlookers, astound passersby and bewilder the waitstaff.

  The women bump glasses just as Laura and Rebecca turn the corner and spot them, glasses in midair, drinking without them at the beginning of Annie’s funeral procession.

  “Hey!” they both yell, running toward the bar. “No fair.”

  The introductions almost seem unnecessary because of their connection to Annie, because of what they are about to do, because they are four women whose lives have hugged the various landscapes of life with equal doses of certainty and uncertainty and even though none of them has been on a traveling funeral before they are determined not to be afraid to jump aboard and see where their common love for Annie G. Freeman will take them.

  Before the bartender can be summoned for another round of drinks, all four women look down at once to discover that three of them, everyone but Katherine, have on red high-topped tennis shoes.

  “Do you have any idea what I went through when I dragged my daughter with me to find these damn shoes?” Rebecca asks. “She actually took photographs of me walking through the house with them on in my bathrobe last night when we got back from the shoe store.”

  “Katherine, where are your shoes?”

  “Fire me,” Katherine responds. “I have a pair right here. I just don’t think it would be a good idea to put them on yet because they are full of Annie’s ashes.”

  “Annie would definitely be pissed,” Jill says. “She’d laugh but she’d still be just a little pissed.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing, then, that I have on tennis shoes even if they aren’t red,” Katherine replies. “Who wants to see the maps?”

  First, before the maps, before the discussion of how this came to be and where it might lead and how they will all cohabit for the next ten days, they all look at each other. They each do it carefully and with the sly idea that no one will see them doing it, but they all catch each other and no one says a word. Already, their secrets could blow apart a gold mine.

  And here is what they see:

  They see a rainbow of life and in one fast glance they see pieces of themselves scattered all over the faces and hands and feet of the woman next to them. There is the instant look of sorrow. The tired lines of ache and loss on each face because of Annie and because of all the others. Because of the mothers and fathers and sisters and lovers who have died.

  They see the way a woman sits to shift the weight from her back. The way one of them crosses her arms and occasionally looks out the window, perhaps wondering if she should have stayed home with the kids and the husband and the job, wondering if the guilt of leaving will overtake her, consume her and obliterate anything positive that may prance into her life. The way another one laughs so spontaneously it is like a breeze off
the ocean in the middle of hot July. The way they are all skirting around the issue of how the giddy fun of the moment and the weight of their loss can be balanced. Or should it be balanced? Should they put it out there or dance slowly into what has started, at what will surely be memorable and remarkable and something that they would never have imagined doing or being a part of just four weeks ago?

  Four weeks ago.

  Four weeks ago when the flowers they each picked and placed in their bedroom windows caught the early morning wind to remind them that Annie loved to do that—just that. Four weeks ago when the ache of her loss was a fresh wound that needed dressing and attending and a glance every few hours to make sure that yes—it really was there and Annie had really died. Four weeks ago when they each held on so tightly to their routines and their men and their children and to other women who called them when they heard because they knew Annie too. Four weeks ago when they were wondering, every single one of them, what Annie might have in store for the world without a funeral, without some wild exhibit of her retreat from this universe to the place she had designed in her head as her next adventure. Four weeks ago when some of them called each other and no one wanted to hang up because at least they had one connection, that voice that they had heard once or twice in the background when they’d called Annie, that woman she also knew and loved, that person, that friend, that female soul who loved Annie G. Freeman maybe, just maybe in the same way that they loved Annie G. Freeman.

  They look and they decide for just a few moments on nothing but to be. Each one of them says it with their eyes. Katherine, looking first to Jill and then to Laura and then to Rebecca, and then everyone else taking a turn to say, “Let’s do this. Let’s have this damn traveling funeral and follow her instructions and spread her fine dusty bones from California to New York and let us do it with the style and grace and the command that Annie used to shape and monitor and guide her life. Let’s laugh into the wind and let’s cry, too, if that is what we feel like doing. Let’s try very hard not to be sorry for what we are doing or to feel guilty for doing it. Annie would hate that,” they all say with their eyes. “Annie would want us to move forward and to do this without caution for a while and to remember the important things about her. Not what she did but who she was. Remember who she was and take all the parts of that—the mistakes and the growing and the openness and the courage—take it and throw it back into the universe. Let’s do this for Annie.”