DISAPPEARING ACT
They took the body before I had the chance to see it in person. The next day, my mom showed me a picture she took of her dead father on her cellphone, hoping that it might give me some second-hand closure. But a picture of a dead body and an actual dead body are two very different things, I know now. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder what she even wanted a picture of her dad's corpse for anyway, especially when we already have so many pictures from when he was still alive scattered around the house save a dozen other artifacts. I guess that everyone grieves differently.
“He looks just like he’s sleeping,” my mother cooed in that tone of voice you use when you’re trying to tell yourself a nice story. I knew better than to correct her, at least not out loud: his mouth hung agape in the most unnatural way; his eyes, although closed, had already sunk deep into his skull, and his skin was a color unknown to those living. But perhaps most unsettling of all was the fact that, because this was only a photograph, frozen in time, I couldn’t tell whether or not he had truly stopped breathing.
I had been in a room with a dead person before, when my other grandpa died, and what shook me to my core way back then was the breath I could no longer hear, couldn’t see in his chest anymore. It’s a certain type of stillness, one that transcends every metaphor. I remember holding my own breath in some fruitless solidarity, waiting for my grandpa to possess himself again, fire right back up like an old AC unit, resume his personality. Much to my surprise, his body just kept on lying there crookedly, no more alive than the surrounding furniture, responding unknowingly:
No; that was it. This is it.
Of course, I was also much younger. My parents never would have used the words “died” or “dead” to say what needed to be said, which only left me all the more confused. Even as recently as yesterday— never “died”, “passed away”— in that same tone of voice that all scared adults use, that same under-rehearsed script. It’s that same tone folks take to when you tell them the news: I’m sorry for your loss. I’m here for you. Something about it has always rubbed me the wrong way— although, in their defense, I’m not exactly sure what I would rather have people say.
Oddly enough, what’s helped me the most has been crying with Trey. He’s been through this before, and been through it at such an age that, like me, that his grandfather is currently living it up with Jesus in Heaven seems highly unlikely, to put it lightly.
“I didn’t even get to see the body,” I got out between sobs. “It feels like he just… disappeared!”
“Yeah, it does feel like that,” he agreed gently. “I don’t think it ever stops feeling like that.” I tried my best in that moment to really appreciate what he was telling me, got sucked into some dissociative tangent about how disappearing might be different from dying, how they might be the same. After a long while of this, Trey piped back up. By the strain in his voice, I could tell that he was trying his best to make sense of death, too. “Well, I’m sure that— your grandpa loved you very much.” It was something he needed to hear, not for me. But I knew that the grief we both shared was the same. Same cause, different symptoms; same death, different man. I don’t think that I needed for my grandpa to have loved me; I have no idea what it is that I needed or need. All I know is that crying for someone, to someone, with someone felt good. To be witnessed while something once false was made brutally true, that felt good. To be held through this labyrinth of messy sensations felt good.
Apparently, Terry Lee Humerickhouse didn’t want a funeral. He wanted no viewing, no celebration of life, no ceremony of any kind to formally recognize his life nor his death; he only wanted to be cremated, quietly and privately. If you were to ask his widow, she would probably tell you that, for all intents and purposes, Terry had died about three or four years ago, back when Dementia (alongside a plethora of other illnesses) rendered him completely unrecognizable to those who once knew him. Maybe it’s naive to say, but I’m sure that the two of them must’ve loved each other at some point, lest they wouldn’t have gotten married. (Some old photographs make them out to have been happy together once, at least.) The same could probably be said for my mother: I’m sure that at some point in her life, she surely must have loved him— even if it was in the complicated, fucked up way that children have to love their parents sometimes. But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure that there was anyone who truly still loved that man by the time that he died, at least not in the traditional sense. I’d like to think that having no proper funeral was out of respect for someone who had long since departed. Besides, my grandmother had already been attending a million mental funerals every day for the last three or four years. Same thing goes for the rest of us, to a much lesser extent. I can’t say that my grandfather played a very personal role in our lives to begin with, but certainly, even my siblings and I understood that this was not the same man we had known in our youth.
When I first heard the news, I immediately procured a beaten-up notepad he had given me just a few months prior. It was chock-full of old poems that he’d written for and about me around the time of my birth. This might be in poor taste, but the poetry itself was pretty amateaur. What his poems lacked in sophistication, however, they more than made up for in their sincerity. Whoever Terry was in the months leading up to his death, twenty-two years ago, he was obviously an incredibly heartfelt and sentimental person who was overjoyed beyond belief to be having his first grandchild. Clearly, from reading his poetry, Trey was right: he did, in fact, love me very much— at least while I was in my infancy.
At the anti-funeral (which felt more like a silent auction than anything), people talked in that same annoying tone of voice, swapping half-baked anecdotes that served as their best attempts at posthumous flattery:
“I remember sitting right here with you and Shelby, and your dad would always be going on about something…”
“He used to take you kids out for ice cream; you’d go out to the park or to the movies…”
Refreshingly, my grandmother spoke of him much more pragmatically:
“He was real’ proud of how handsome he was in his younger days; he’d pull out photographs from when he was in grade school or the police force or the marines and ask if I thought he was cute.”
Or:
“Towards the end there, he liked to take all of his things out of the drawers and just look at them. He’d take all his coins and just stack them up, right there on the living room table in little piles. He made quite the mess, but it gave him something to do.”
In the middle of all this storytelling and silent-auctioning, I pulled my grandmother aside to tell her that, upon hearing of her husband’s death, one of the first things I thought about was how happy I was for her. I said that I had a lot of respect for her for continuing to take care of someone who was not only a great burden, but more often than not, a completely ruthless one. He did all the typical paranoid / senile type of shit you always hear about: constantly shouting obscenities at her, yelling and screaming, accusing her of doing things that he couldn’t remember doing; and all the while, she was cooking, she was cleaning, she was buying his groceries and wiping his ass. “I can’t even imagine what that was like, grandma,” which was another way of saying, “You’re a far better man than me.” Tears started to spring up, rolled down into that same sad, tired smile that I’d seen her wear for the last three or four years.
“It was a thankless job,” she acknowledged, her eyes humbly fluttering between me and her disappearing act of a husband. For the very first time, it occurred to me that sometimes love is a thankless job. I leaned in for a hug, and she told me another secret: “Last night was the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in about three or four years.”