Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  Of course they will be pissed off and then forgive her for dying when one of them falls out of love and needs help. Needs help to realize it’s okay to fall out of love and to move on and that there is a way to do that with great dignity and compassion. Annie would have helped them through that with her own stories and with a walk in the park and a night on the town and with the way she would fan her hand out across the horizon and tell them that life has so many pages to turn and that this page does not mean the story is over.

  The story is never over.

  “Shit,” Rebecca says. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Katherine says “shit” and then Laura says it and then Jill and finally Marie. They say “shit” singularly and they all stand up and hold hands and they say it together.

  “Shit.”

  Then they say it again.

  “Shit.”

  And then they cry. They don’t want to cry because they are sick of crying and missing and wishing for something that will never come again, but something they also know is as real and large and as wonderful as the legacy of kicking ass that Annie G. Freeman left them.

  They don’t want to cry but it is an emotion that washes over them and covers their hands and arms and fingers and feet in a cleansing movement that is a bonding element that guards and keeps them tied together as if they are in a club for women warriors where teardrops, golden pure and sweet teardrops, come from a common river that runs through all women and holds them together in a way that Annie G. Freeman helped them to see and to live.

  They huddle in their bathrobes, the pallbearers for Annie’s fabu-lous traveling funeral, and they just let it go. They cry for how pissed off they are because Annie has died. They cry because they love her and now they love each other. They cry because there is an ache inside each one of them that is raw, new, fresh and a wound that needs tending now and for many days to come. A wound that will never quite heal but a wound that will allow them to run their fingers over the top of it, feel it, know that it is there and will always be a part of them until they are designing their own traveling funeral and about to meet Annie again in a place they imagine is a glorious paradise of freedom, wildness and fun. Always fun.

  They cry and hold each other in a solidarity stance that says without having to utter a word that now they have Annie, they have this, they have their memories and they also have each other. They have phone numbers and this unique spread of time and they have a glimpse into each other’s souls that no one else has. They have the warmth and security that comes from knowing you can trust someone, that the woman next to you will not call her sister and tell her what you look like running naked from a freezing body of water or sleeping with your mouth open after consuming several bottles of wine, or sobbing on an airplane while a piece of bread is stuck to your front tooth.

  They cry because they are raw. They are raw from an openness that has been like an emotional surgery that has ripped them open and exposed a love for a woman, their friend, that is vital and secure and that they know will go on long after the last of the ashes have been spread.

  It will go on for years and years as they remember bits and pieces of not only this traveling funeral but of the times they shared with Annie and with each other. The times when they knew Annie could not be replaced but that she had left them this great gift of each other and the freedom to launch ahead with whatever became exposed during the traveling funeral.

  The funeral where they laughed and cried and danced and sang and saw parts of the world and of Annie that they should have known existed but had never bothered to visit, not because they didn’t care or didn’t want to, but because they were consumed by the real parts of living and loving that mattered more than going to confession over the little things. The funeral that gave them a chance, a chance to live in a way that was not necessarily new but definitely larger and bolder and more satisfying then the worlds that they had spun around themselves, their lovers and families.

  The funeral that gave them a chance to say things about Annie and to Annie that most of them said when she was alive but not everything—not every damn thing.

  And so they cry and they say things to each other in a practice session for what they will take with them and what they will say to other people whom they love and honor and cherish. They say how they loved being themselves and how they loved knowing they could make a stinker after lunch and no one would say anything. They say how they were scared about losing Annie because she was so much a part of them and who they were and eventually became. They will say how they appreciated the openness and every little kind gesture that was passed around as if that is just how it is supposed to be.

  They say how they loved being with women—women—who knew what they needed without asking and who got their shit. They loved not having to worry about what was for dinner and how someone would react if they told a secret. They said how wonderful it was to be gracious to each other and realistic at the same time and how whatever happened, every single thing, had given them a new face to love and hand to hold and how Annie’s greatest gift to them had apparently been each other.

  Katherine, Marie, Jill, Laura and Rebecca cry for a very long time and they wipe their noses on the edges of each other’s bathrobes and Jill goes to get them all glasses of water, and then they cry just a little bit more until they realize that it is two P.M. and that they have less than an hour to get their shit together, get to the airport, and fly into the rest of their lives.

  Then they move like hungry lions.

  The women pack and prance around the room and they take the three extra bottles of champagne so they can continue the funeral on the airplane and then they take turns kissing each other and they throw a kiss to “the man” and then they run to get into the limousine and on the way to the airport they make believe that they are movie actors and that they are on the way to a premier in California that is about to make them stars.

  Stars.

  Glorious, brilliant beautiful wise female stars.

  29

  * * *

  Just before they get out of the limousine and double-knot the red high-tops for the last leg of the traveling funeral, Laura, Marie, Rebecca, Katherine and Jill decide to wear the red bandanas—which (thank the heavens) have been washed and pressed into neat four-square sections like they remember their fathers’ handkerchiefs being folded—tied into their hair so that they look red from head to toe.

  “Hey,” the driver tells them as he pulls in front of the airport that had been their home just the day before. “You dudes look pretty cool.”

  “Yo,” Jill says, laughing.

  “Dudes,” Katherine laughs back. “Isn’t it something that women can be dudes these days? You should hear my daughter, she’s constantly ‘Hey duding’ every single person, especially her girlfriends. It used to drive me nuts but now I think it’s a tribute to the degender modification that has been cranking for more than a few years.”

  “My daughters do the same thing. What’s with that?” Marie asks.

  “ ‘Dudette’ just doesn’t seem to sound quite right,” Laura agrees. “When my daughter was around she was into the same thing. If this dude thinks we look like cool dudes in our bandanas I am surely not going to dismiss this modern and very fine compliment.”

  “Yo,” the driver responds, which sends them all into a round of laughter that carries them to the check-in counter where they have major déjà vu.

  Everywhere they look they see the same people from the day before. The woman from behind the counter, half the people from the waiting room, and, they suspect, somewhere lurking in the crowd is “the man.” They look for him to see if they can decide who he is but then give up when they realize that just about every single person in the airport knows who they are and is smiling and waving at them.

  “Hey, you look fabulous,” their airline friend behind the counter tells them. “Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Last night and this morning and every single s
econd since our plane was stranded,” Katherine shares. “We were kind of hoping for another storm. We spent the morning looking for apartments in Minneapolis.”

  “You kill me,” the woman tells her and then says, “Oops, sorry,” and points to Annie’s ashes.

  “She’d love that, sweetheart,” Katherine assures her. “Don’t worry. We are all in good hands.”

  “Listen, you were already booked into first class for this trip, by that Annie woman, which I find amazing considering she’s in that shoebox under your arm, no disrespect intended, so what I’ve done is given you a free upgrade on those other tickets you have from yesterday.”

  Katherine looks to the left and the right at her friends and wonders in amazement if things could get any better.

  “I don’t suppose one of us won the Pulitzer or a Guggenheim or a Nobel Peace Prize this morning while we were getting our nails buffed?”

  “Not that I know of,” the woman says, laughing. “But I am imagining this will be another interesting part of your journey because just about every single person on board has stopped to ask if the ‘funeral women’ are on their flight. It ain’t over yet, apparently.”

  “Let us at them,” Laura shouts as she turns around. “If we can stay awake we are all theirs.”

  Balinda calls Katherine just as they are about to board to let them know her mother appears to be getting better and that she arrived safely back into the womb of her own world and misses them terribly.

  “It’s strange,” Balinda says. “She’s started eating a bit and when I was gone this Polish nurse got her to start speaking in English.”

  “You should never have gone back,” Katherine tells her as she waves the other women onto the airplane. “Maybe she’d be speaking French by the end of the week.”

  “I’m stumped,” Balinda tells her. “Maybe she needed to get out of the house as much as I needed to get out of the house. Sometimes you just don’t know until you do it, try it or, I suppose, be it.”

  Katherine rushes onto the plane just before they close the doors and is not at all surprised to see her “dudes” already holding court during the last few hours of the traveling funeral as they lean over their extra-wide seats and across the aisle to talk to a group of women who seem to be fascinated by the red tennies, the traveling funeral and where they can get a copy of the program so they can begin designing their own traveling funerals.

  She is not sure as she walks up the aisle if she wants to get into it for the next four hours, drink the champagne, or sit quietly and prepare herself for the jump back into reality. She decides before she sits down to combine all four.

  And she begins by also deciding that they all need to add one more note in the funeral book, without Annie’s thoughts, just their thoughts, as they descend from the happy and sometimes sorrowful high of the last nine days and into the arms of the days and nights that lie in front of them.

  Work. Kids. Husbands. Lovers. Schedules. Life without Annie in her physical form. Changes. Letting go and holding on. Whatever it takes. Here it comes. Ready or not.

  She begins writing as the huge plane picks up speed and Minneapolis becomes a palate of green mixed in with blocks of the whites, grays and blacks that are the colors of cities, every city, from the air. Her eyes linger for a moment on the diminishing skyline of a city that turned into an adventure, a quick stopover that changed lives, a thirty-minute blip that turned into almost two days.

  That is what grabs her mind as Jill, Laura, Marie and Rebecca quietly succumb to the few quiet moments when it is hard to talk, when they climb into clouds and fly—which still amazes her—into an hour that has already passed in the time zone they are just leaving—which also amazes her—in a place that has now become an important stop on her memory chain, in her life and especially in her heart.

  * * *

  KATHERINE THOUGHT: We are heading back home, Annie, and there is just a tiny bit of you left in this box, enough for one more drop into the wind, enough for one more encounter with whatever it is that helped form you. We are tired and grateful and more alive, I think, than any of us have ever been before. I want to lie down in this seat and open my eyes and look across the aisle and see you reading and writing in your notebook. I can’t help it. Sometimes when I think of you and then remember that you are gone, my stomach rushes to my throat and I have this spontaneous reaction that makes me wonder how I will ever be the same. Then my analytical side grabs me, Annie, it grabs me and I realize that I will never be the same and how wonderful is that? I realize that this traveling funeral that you designed is what I needed to help me in so many ways. I know this:

  I love you and will always love you.

  We gave each other the world in a way that the other could not always see.

  Something happened to me on this trip—a break in the link of my planned and paced life that is going to change everything.

  I cannot wait.

  You have shared your best and most important friends with me and for that—oh, Annie—for that, my heart aches in gratitude.

  We are done.

  And we will never be done.

  The funeral book passes from one set of pallbearer’s hands to the next as the plane levels off, as the hundreds of people who are flying into their own futures stake out their temporary place on the plane and in each other’s lives and as the traveling funeral dudes get ready for what is left of this day and this terribly important part of Annie’s funeral.

  * * *

  LAURA THOUGHT: Sometimes I am so pissed that you are gone I could go blind with anger and then I realize that not once, not even once, in my life has anger given me anything positive or taken me to a new place. Well, once it got my daughter to stay home and the party she was supposed to go to got busted but that really didn’t change anything. Gliding back, I am ready now to share our secret, Annie. I have saved it for the end. I have honored your idea that we should let it ride so that it would not color anything that happened after your death and I have managed, with great difficulty, to keep my big mouth shut. And, oh Annie, I have seen so many new possibilities in my life and with this chance that you have given me. You think that I saved you all those years ago but I think you are the one who saved me. You spread choices like a roving parade that included the banquet of life in front of me. I’m not scared anymore. I am excited and ready to land—so damn ready to land and then take off again.

  * * *

  JILL THOUGHT: I could have stayed home and taken up knitting and sat on the back porch with my cooler of water and this longing for the past and my lost world and the touch of academia that I so need to help me breathe. I could have lapsed into a coma on that porch and the swallows could have picked out my eyes and laughed at me as they carried off my chairs and the car and the lawn mower. I could have skated through another week and a month and the year after that with this grieving force and this burden of loss from you and my former life and with the things—and I mean things—that I thought I need to stay alive. Then came this funeral and these women and the chance to look into the mirror and see myself and my life and the possibility that comes when there is a sudden change. I am even more grateful now for knowing you and for touching your life than I have ever been. I’m pissed that you died, but I rejoice in your gifts, in your grace, in the way that you linger in my life, our lives, even now as we cruise toward home and the rest of our lives in a way that I could never have imagined just a short week ago.

  * * *

  REBECCA THOUGHT: You are such a bitch. Do you have any idea how hard this has been? How wonderful? Here is what I know:

  I will miss you every day for the rest of my life.

  I loved you in a way that I have never loved anyone else.

  Your patience and persistence helped me plow around some new corners in my own life.

  The gathering together of these women has created a brigade of friendship.

  No one else who meets us will ever be the same.

  I am learning to mix
my sorrow over this great loss along with the remembering and the honoring of what we had as friends, neighbors and women on the run. I am learning how to temper my anger at the seemingly unending numbers of deaths I have to embrace with the realities of life, happenstance and circumstance and I am doing all of that while I hold on to my own heart, my own self, the person I was. I don’t want to let that slip away and I am trying hard to honor everything and everyone in the process.

  I cannot imagine ever not missing you, not instinctively turning to see if your bathroom light is on, not listening for the crunch of your tires on the gravel driveway, not longing to talk to you, see you smile, put a cold drink in your hand in the middle of July.

  I miss you, Annie G. Freeman, and even as I believe and know I will see you again, I also believe and know that in the midst of all your humanness you were a golden glow that filled my life in ways I will always and forever appreciate.

  * * *

  MARIE THOUGHT: I should have listened to you and embarked on this adventure sooner. I should have known you were dishing out advice about my own life even as you died. Here I thought this was a funeral—your funeral—and it’s turned into something way beyond that. Your friends are grand and you were a spirit of inspiration and knowledge to me even for the short period of time when our lives touched. Our lives are still touching, Annie. They will always touch.

  When Marie closes the funeral book, places her hands over the top of it and turns to Katherine, she asks, “Now what?”

  “Apparently we will also be going to Poland,” Rebecca says.