Over Our Heads

by Andrea Thompson

  THE OUTSIDE OF Mourning Glory Funeral Home looked like an auto body shop. In fact, Rachel was pretty sure it had been an auto body shop at some point as four large garage doors made up the front of the building. This was going to be a disaster, Rachel thought as she pulled the car into the lot, imagining an interior décor of grease-stained walls, and gas station bathrooms, a cardboard air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangling from the soap dispensers. Rachel should have never let Sam sweet-talk her into letting him and Emma take over the funeral arrangements.

  “Well, this looks interesting,” she said as she put the Benz into park and pulled the key out of the ignition.

  “It’s fine, Rachel,” Emma said, as she got out of the back seat. “Chill. It’s going to be great.”

  “Chill.” That was Sam’s word. Emma was like a sponge. How many other people’s words lived inside her?

  Sam looked over at Rachel from the front passenger seat with a pretend stern expression.

  “What?” Rachel mouthed to him.

  The outside of the chapel was deceiving. Inside, the space had been tastefully renovated, the foyer walls were a cheerful light yellow. The lamps were nice. Crystal. Real? No, likely not, but decent replicas. Light filled the space through sheers over the garage doors, which from the inside, just looked like four large windows.

  The funeral director came to meet them. He was handsome. Too handsome to run a funeral home. And too young; he was in his mid-thirties at most. His suit was stylish, his hair coiffed like the guy from the Twilight movies. He was a bit too Hollywood for Rachel’s liking, but his demeanor, at least, was unobtrusive and reserved. When he shook her hand and offered his condolences, Rachel could feel Emma watching her, scanning Rachel’s face for a reaction. Searching for approval. Grandma’s funeral or not, it was always about The Emma Show. All Emma. All the time.

  The inside of the chapel was dark green. It had high, wood-panelled ceilings and large stained glass windows. At least there weren’t any depictions of Jesus or Mary or angels. So far so good.

  The photos of Grandma were set up in a gallery area off the foyer. The Mourning Glory staff had taken care of that. They had set up a guest book next to the display as well. The urn was at the front of the chapel. It was the same as in the pictures that Rachel had browsed through when she chose it, dark blue with small pink and white flowers. Forget-me-nots. There were two young attendants in crisp white shirts and dark blue blazers standing by the front door, ready to respectfully usher in guests. Everything seemed in order. Ready. Still, there was the service to consider. Emma had moved outside, and was sitting on a bench, writing in her notebook. Lester paced in front of her, smoking, as if there was nothing else to be done. Rachel went toward the doors. Sam stepped into her path.

  “No. Leave it, Rach. It’s all fine. Chill. Get some tea. There’s nothing to do now.”

  Rachel turned around without replying, and sat on a cream faux-suede sofa. She checked her phone. It was Friday after all, there could be news. But there was nothing from Nina about Wanda. No messages. No e-mail. Nothing.

  Sam sat down on the couch next to her.

  “It’s harder than you thought it would be, isn’t it?” he said.

  Rachel looked at him, took a breath, and opened her mouth. Then she closed it again, and looked down. Wet dots, the size of dimes, began to appear on her brown skirt.

  “Sometimes it takes something like this,” Sam continued, looking at his hands, giving her privacy, “to bring everything to a head. It hasn’t been easy for any of us, but you, you’ve been holding down the fort for everyone since Grandma died.”

  Rachel didn’t look up. Her shoulders moved up and down rhythmically.

  “But I have a feeling that after today, you’ll be able to put a lot of things to rest once and for all,” he said, adding, “Dad, Grandma, Mom – all of it.”

  Rachel put her hands over her face.

  “Breathe,” Sam said, putting his arm around her shoulder. “Just breathe, Rachel. That’s all there is to do now.”

  Rachel put down her hands, and pushed herself away from him. She looked up, and met his eyes. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

  “Breathe,” Sam said.

  Rachel took a deep breath, held it then exhaled.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  32.

  MAY 20, 2012

  Everyone has their own personal mythology, their own unique view of themselves and their place in the world. If you’re lucky, your thought patterns, your system, your lens is something that others can identify, something people can put a label on – Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist. Even if they misinterpret what that means, at least people can have a clue as to how you see the world. But if your personal mythology has no official, easily recognizable title, you’re screwed. Then, even if you try to explain it to people, there’s about a hundred percent chance they’ll get it wrong. Because words fail. That’s why poetry – it’s only through the misuse of words, the breaking of agreed upon customs of sentence structure and grammar imposed on thought by prose – that one can get anywhere near something resembling the truth.

  It’s like how you become animated, speaking in mime with your hands, drawing pictures in the sky, when you try to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak your language. In the end, they may nod and smile to indicate comprehension, but chances are that some subtlety in your meaning has been missed. And when that happens, the mind fills in the blanks. When we input information that is incomplete, or that we don’t understand, we make up the rest. It’s how our brain was built. If we were in the jungle, being attacked by a tiger, we wouldn’t have time to really examine the charging beast; tail – check, stripes – check, whiskers – check, claws – check, teeth … there’s no time for that. So our brain, instead, takes a quick look for salient features, then says: tiger – run! But when our brain is trying to grasp the paradoxically complex subtleties of a human being, this quick recognition method is ineffective, leads us running down the wrong path.

  Who I am

  depends on which side of my skin

  you stand on, in here

  it’s all neurons firing

  synapses telling stories

  blood tracing ancestral histories

  races blending in veins

  truth obscured by memory

  inside all is flux and flow

  stillness and storms

  contradiction – and at the heart of it

  just another mammal

  wanting to be loved

  outside is all vibration

  rubbing up against eardrum

  someone’s mouth pounds out

  enigma

  my mind tries it on, pins it

  itchy like a label on my lapel

  and wonders

  if the skin over bone

  wrapping around this self

  distracts

  sends the other off

  to question, not who I am

  but what.

  “What do you think Rachel’s going to say if Wanda shows up?” Lester ran his hand through his hair, as he stopped his frenetic pacing and smoking long enough to interrupt Emma’s train of thought. She closed her notebook with a sigh, and put it on the bench next to her. She should have known better than to try to write with Lester around. He always interrupted. He couldn’t help himself, without attention he withered.

  “Seriously, Em. What do you think she’ll say?”

  It was morbid to look forward to a funeral. But Emma couldn’t blame him. She knew that there was a chance that their mother would attend. Sam hadn’t heard confirmation from Nina that Wanda was on her way yet, but there was still time. Emma was also eager for the service to start. She knew that their grandmother would have loved what she and Sam had planned.

  Lester waited for Emma to rep
ly. She shrugged. Words felt heavy in her throat. Talking felt like too much work. Rachel? Rachel was a work-in-progress. She hadn’t liked the look of the place from outside; that much was clear. It had almost been impossible to stop her checking it out beforehand, but the week had kept her busy with executor duties. There were papers only she could sign, things that only she could do – Rachel’s forte. So she didn’t like the outside of the place? So what? What was more important was the service. What would Rachel think about that?

  So, the funeral home was a converted old mechanic’s shop. It had belonged to Brad, the funeral director’s father.

  “Mourning Glory. That name’s a little cheesy eh? Well, maybe not cheesy, but bland for sure.” Lester lit up another smoke. “I thought it was a bit of a fucking cliché, but I didn’t want to say anything to Brad over there. Mourning Glory. They should have asked me. I could have given them some ideas. They could have called it something like, the Goodbye Garage, or how about Life’s a Gas?” Lester laughed.

  Emma smiled, and looked past him. People streamed into the building. Grandma knew everyone.

  Mourning Glory. Rachel would call it a cliché for sure. Emma had seen her roll her eyes at the brochure, maybe because there was a typo or grammatical error. But, other than that, she had seemed satisfied enough. Emma had known that Rachel could sense her watching when Rachel went to shake Brad’s hand. She had hoped Rachel would feel something in his touch, some energy passed on from all the grieving people he’d connected with in the past. But Rachel’s face held steady. She’d left Brad and walked unaffected around the chapel like she was doing an inspection. At one point, she had looked over at the light switch, but her arms had stayed by her side. She had started to come outside for a minute, but Sam had stopped her, and then led her back inside to sit down and do nothing. As Emma had watched her through the window, she realized that it was the first time she had ever seen Rachel just let herself be.

  Too bad it had only been for a few minutes – then the first guests began to arrive. Rachel stayed on the couch for a moment, but no, of course, she had to do the greeting herself. A second later, she was welcoming everyone. Gracious and composed.

  Emma sniffled into a Kleenex, and listened to Lester talk. From a tree in a yard across the street, a raven cawed. Emma looked up, closed her eyes, and received an image of the mouth of a cave. Thank you, she said in her mind, for the reminder. Raven medicine was all about entering into the abyss – the great mystery. She had been given a gift by one of the world’s greatest magicians – a primordial image to remind her that death was an entrance as much as an exit. It was the great confounder, holding its secrets until the very end. Emma opened her eyes and smiled.

  “What?” Lester was staring at her. Emma didn’t want to get into an argument about animal medicine – cosmic messages from her furry friends, as Lester called them. No, she decided to move the conversation in a different direction.

  “This is all bullshit,” Emma said, suddenly standing up, taking up the pacing where Lester left off.

  “What?” Lester was losing patience.

  “All this death stuff. All this – ” Emma waved her hand around like a Price is Right girl. “This big Gone Forever Show. Grandma isn’t gone. Why am I not allowed to say that? Why do I have to sit and cry and pretend that somehow Grandma isn’t like absolutely everything else in the universe? Energy doesn’t die; it just changes form. Grandma’s body’s dead – sure, but that’s it. That’s all we know for sure.” Emma started to laugh. Lester took hold of Emma’s arm and led her back to the bench. She sat and he looked at her with an unfamiliar expression of fatherly protectiveness.

  You can see it in people’s faces sometimes, when they’re quiet and unaware, you can see their secret self. It’s in the eyes – that ghost that haunts them. Some people’s eyes are quiet and sad, and tell you of lonely nights of hopelessness. Some eyes betray fear, showing snapshots of tossed and turned early mornings full of “what if’s.” Some people’s secret faces warn that they would kill you in an instant – if they really wanted to, if they thought they could get away with it – not from malice so much as sheer release. It was usually one of these three – sadness, fear, or anger that escaped from the eyes when people didn’t know they were being watched. Those shadow eyes behind people’s faces always showed what was unacknowledged.

  Rachel’s secret face held fear, panic and unrelenting, raw anxiety. She put forward an outside face of being stoic and brave, but her hidden face was ready to crumble under the pressure. Emma thought her own shadow face held indifference. Emma was indifferent the way she turned a blind eye from the complicated – like listening to animals – yet doing nothing to speak up for them. Instead, Emma participated in their suffering by wearing leather, sometimes even eating meat. She was willing to empathize but refused to take action. She could love, but wouldn’t commit. Emma lived in a purgatory of faith. She believed in everything and nothing at the same time.

  “You need to calm down, Em. Breathe. You’re going through a huge loss here. You’re losing the one stable parental influence you’ve ever had in your life. Of course it’s going to feel like the rug is getting pulled out from under.”

  Emma looked up at him. He was right. Some things would never be back, like the smell of Grandma in the house or the sound of her singing off key.

  “So don’t let it fuck you up too much. Don’t get hysterical.”

  Emma stood up. He was trying, but he went too far – from compassion to condescension. She wanted to smash something.

  “Maybe you should do something normal, like greet the guests with Rachel.” Lester could teach workshops on how to say the wrong thing, and then say something next to make it worse. That was the last thing Emma wanted to do. Stand there with Rachel like some wax mannequin, pretending to feel things she didn’t. No. Emma didn’t want to look into all those sad faces and secret eyes, one after another with their endless mantra of, “So sorry for your loss.”

  She didn’t want to believe what they believed. It wasn’t new age woo-woo; it was truth. Rachel, of all people, should have understood. It was Rachel who first told Emma about that thermal dynamics law that said energy never dies – can never be destroyed. It was science. Grandma wasn’t gone. Not all of her, anyway. When Emma had picked up the music for the service, when she had written the eulogy, chosen the photographs for the gallery, Grandma had been there. She could feel her, in a breeze blowing through the window that brushed against her cheek, in a horn honking at just the right moment. Grandma hadn’t gone anywhere.

  The raven was back. He sat in a tree, somewhere over Emma’s head. She listened for pictures or words from the bird. But there was nothing, just the sound of his call – caw, caw, caw – like thunder into silence. Raven medicine rained down – the trickster, the magi, ambassador of the Great Mystery. Gatekeeper to the void.

  Emma laughed, putting her hand over her mouth. Lester looked up, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back down next to him on the bench. He looked worried. Be nice Emma, he’s trying. He can feel it too, but he doesn’t know what it is, so he’s scared. He loves you. He’s trying. Emma looked at him, and her eyes began to well up again.

  “You want some tea or something?” Lester stood up and stretched. It was too much water for a Taurus like Lester. He knew enough to take a break before his earth turned into mud.

  “Yes. Sure. Tea.” He walked away, looking back with a face full of concern that faded quickly into relief as he headed back into the building.

  Emma sat very still, breathing deeply. The raven was silent.

  Everyone talks about the miracle of birth, but Emma had never heard anyone talk about the miracle of death – how awe-inspiring and beautiful it is to witness someone you love traverse the space between here and elsewhere. Nobody ever talks about how death seduces with it’s beauty, how it humbles, crushes, and uplifts all at the same time. How only in the depths of g
rief do people call out for answers to the mystery of existence, and how easy it is to miss those answers if you refuse to become quiet and listen.

  Emma never suspected it would be the death of the one person she loved and trusted most on this earth that would leave her with the unshakable sense of knowing that no one, nothing could ever truly be lost.

  “Oh look, Emma, it’s Grandpa,” Grandma had said, that last night in the hospital. She had been scratching at the bed sheets, which is what happened when people started travelling. It had even said so in the pamphlet they hand out in the palliative ward, though they hadn’t called it that. The pamphlet had also said that those who are dying will “hallucinate,” perhaps thinking that they see the people in their lives who have already passed on.

  Emma had known they only say it’s a biological process so people won’t freak out. Rachel would have, but she had been getting more ice chips to chew on (another suggestion from the pamphlet), when Grandma had first started to talk about what she saw on the other side.

  And then, after waking from a short, restless nap, “Emma, it’s your little dog!”

  “Is his name Barney, Grandma?”

  “Barney, yes, that’s his name. He’s a smart little thing, isn’t he? Cute. Barney.”

  It hadn’t been a fair test. Emma shouldn’t have fed her the name. If Grandma had guessed it on her own, that would have been something. Statistically significant results, as Rachel would say. Still, Emma knew what she knew, and she didn’t want to stand in some stupid funeral receiving line with one pair of sad eyes after another trying to tell her different. She’d rather sit on the bench, breathe, watch the sky and listen for the raven’s return.

  33.

  WANDA WAS SITTING in the corner, by the window of the coffee shop, with her dirty clothes and greasy, stringy hair falling down. Her hair was mostly grey now; the moustache she used to shave and bleach had filled in thick. Her body had too. She had chunked up after they got her meds right and she had stopped her manic marathon walks from Jack’s place in Gastown to the beach in Kitsilano.