Al, the Church, and the Funeral

My extended family makes me uncomfortable pretty much across the board. They are all strangers to me that I am weirdly supposed to love and care about. I would see them maybe once a year on holidays and there are so many of them that I would forget names of grandchildren, sometimes aunts and uncles too. I also realize this is not a unique experience. And why would it be? In a time when nuclear families are more mobile, how can a lot of people have close relationships with relatives? Honestly, I don't care about any of that, it isn't on my mind, it just seems like the way most of these start out and maybe they shouldn't, but I'm no trailblazer.

Last Friday was my Grandmother's funeral and I decided rather than going to the wake the night before, I would drive up from Richmond to Baltimore early in the morning. Accounting for an hour of traffic, I showed up promptly thirty minutes late, without a tie, and walked in the wrong door. I took a seat in the way far back of the Catholic Church my grandparent's belonged to for probably twenty-five or more years, and far back in an old Catholic Church is different than far back in any other church. I was behind grandiose roman columns, at least 1,000 pews, and about a quarter mile from the pulpit. As soon as I sat down, my eldest three female cousins started down the red carpet of the center aisle toward me. I was pretending to look at other things, not that there was anything to look at, I just didn't know how to prime my eye contact for the right moment. Apparently, they came back to the table right behind me to collect the 'gifts' (some blend of herbs and spices that Catholics use to season their newly dead) for a certain part of the ceremony and the most outgoing one said 'Oh, all the grandsons are sitting up front, you should go up there with them.' 'Uh, that's okay, maybe I shouldn't I don't want to disturb anyone,' I replied. 'No way, you're totally fine, seriously, just go,' she said, and I knew there was no place for a rebuttal, so I began that slow, awkward walk down the center of the church, parading my tardiness in front of all my grieving relatives whom I speak with once a year, if that.

By the time I got down the aisle, we had reached the point in the service designated for communion. I knew that Catholics are funny about non-Catholic people receiving communion, but I figured, 'hey, it's a funeral, I was Catholic until I was twelve, I did the First Communion thing, I'll be fine.' I did, however, second guess myself when the cousin to my right stayed seated when everyone else got up, but he pushed me along and told me I, 'should definitely go if I wanted to.'

The priest looked at me, held out a small wafer of bread, and said 'the body of Christ.' I held out my hands, as one does, and smiled half-heartedly while saying nothing but trying to seem thankful. 'What do you say?' The priest said condescendingly. I was so taken aback that he wouldn't let me just do this thing to conform if I didn't know the magic word. Thoughts raced through my mind, 'Uh, the bread of heaven?' I said questioningly. That is what they say at my dad's church and I thought it might apply here. 'No! That is what Episcopalians say,' he scoffed, 'Are you Episcopalian?' My mouth replied without my brain 'y-yeah, I guess so.' Putting the bread back into the bowl, he said 'They preach heresy,' and more loudly, 'Go read the Book of Common Prayer.' While he was calling me a heretic at my grandmother's funeral, he raised his hand and rubbed his greasy thumb on my forehead, signing the cross. Then, he grabbed me by my sleeve and pulled me out of his way, awaiting his next victim.

I was fuming and laughing in disbelief. The ghost of the staircase, or as the French say L'espirt de l'escalier, was filling my mind with everything I should have said. 'Should I become a Catholic and offer up my child to systematic molestation?' 'Have I not stolen enough money from people throughout history to eat your bread?' 'Or is it because I don't believe that bread will magically turn into flesh when it is in my stomach which makes me unfit for your group?'

When the service was over, I resigned to not get in anyone's way and to try to make it out of there without anyone else yelling at me. In this process, I found myself in the back-middle of the funeral procession. We were headed through downtown, busy-ass Towson Maryland, running red lights and going twenty-five miles an hour to a cemetery five miles away. With seven of my cousins behind me, I navigated these choppy waters the best I could, really getting on the tail of the car in front of me. When we showed up to the funeral site, after getting severely parked in on all sides, there were marines holding rifles and a whole lot of old people I didn't recognize. I turned around and my cousin said 'huh, I didn't know the spouse also got a military funeral.' Her face then contorted in a questioning way when scanning the crowd, 'Alex, do you know any of these people?' I shook my head with wide eyes.

Somehow or another, I had led my seven cousins into the wrong funeral procession where we were thereby deeply parked in at someone else's burial site. I honestly couldn't believe I screwed something else up, but here I was, all my cousins making fun of me while also feeling truly uncomfortable where we were.

Luckily my grandmother's burial site was only about a twenty minute walk, so we made it there eventually. It turned out they were waiting for us because the majority of the pallbearers were in my line. I was supposed to bear palls with my cousins but I opted out since there were so many of us that we couldn't all fit. Because I didn't want to participate in looking like an army of ants carrying a leaf, I took a spot right near the hole they would lay the casket in. The pallbearing cousins carried it over in front of me and put it on the mechanism that would lower Grandma into the ground. I'm not sure what went wrong, to my eye and mind nothing did, but the priest's assistant, who was carrying the holy water, shook his head when they set down the casket and said not so much under his breath, 'God dammit, this fucking family.'