The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream
Recently I was in bed, warm and comfortable, and then sat up in a panic because I remembered that I'd scheduled a donation pickup for the next morning and they always show up at the crack of dawn to collect in my neighborhood so I had to get up and handle it NOW.
Somehow in the process of hauling out the bag of clothes and books and random tchotchkes I'd put aside, I decided that it looked paltry and that the good people of the Lupus Foundations would JUDGE ME FOR IT, and stumbled into my basement to hunt out more random donatable crap I could put in boxes and get out of my life and into someone else's. (I do not actually think the charity workers of the donation planned to judge me; sleep deprivation is just a hell of a thing.)
A lot of the stuff in the basement is Louise's, and I have an awful time getting rid of it because emotions are strange and even though my brain can tell me intellectually that I do not need that box of crappy Halloween decorations from our 2012 Halloween party, another part of my brain panics and thinks that if I get rid of them, maybe I'll lose the memory of that party, and the memories of our other Halloweens, and also, like, maybe she will come back and haunt me. It's not rational! (The memory bit, anyway. The haunting is very much on the table.) But it's also not worth torturing myself over, so I get rid of stuff when I have the emotional strength, and try not to worry too much about it when I don't. I have tried to donate her ski boots like four times now, and every time I've chickened out. Last time I got them all the way to the donation center before putting them back in my trunk.
If there's one thing the whole COVID-19 quarantine helped me with, it's that it actually made it easier to throw away or donate a lot of stuff. I'm not sure why, except everything was so surreal already, it felt like everything I did didn't really count, or something. All the rules were different.
Anyway, I was having a go at putting some of the really extraneous Halloween stuff in a box, which included dithering over her slutty pumpkin costume. This was, of course, inspired from the same slutty pumpkin costume of the How I Met Your Mother fame, and from one of our Halloween parties. She and one of her work friends both wore slutty pumpkin outfits, something that I recall secretly resenting. Not because I wanted to dress as a slutty pumpkin-- Christ, no-- but I was more than a little miffed that she asked her work friend and not me, and I vaguely remember how we drunkenly got into it later that night. She said something kinda mean about my fashion sense, and I retaliated by saying something along the lines of oh yeah well your sweater looks like a pile of labias (I distinctly remember that insult, anyway), and we had a very awkward domestic argument in front of her work friend, who was on the verge of passing out drunk anyway.
It was not one of my finer moments.
Anyway, I did donate it in the end, though her ski boots are still hanging out in my foyer. Maybe I'll manage to let them go this year! I also kept the fog machine, because honestly I can think of a lot of instances where I might need a fog machine. And I got rid of another bag of her clothes, which I work through slowly, and which I keep in her old room anyway, because even though I wear and use some of them, it's easier to keep track of them there. I have a great fear of accidentally wearing something significant of hers when I visit her parents. This very nearly happened the last time I was out there, which was when I went out to support Mike, Louise's ex-boyfriend, and maker of the famous Platypus Bell, which featured heavily in my college livejournal entries, when his father passed away.
Mike and I have a strange relationship, where we both are aware that Louise was basically the only thing holding us together as friends, and now that she's gone, we really don't have anything in common except for her and also the fact we both like hiking at Great Falls. We can't stop, exactly, but both of us keep going on changing, and the one thing that we were connected on is very much not changing. Or rather, there are never any new updates on it. It's like we're stuck in time, or, like-- the best way I can describe it is like being obligated to go to a high school reunion every year, but with only two people attending. (We also have a weird thing where we know basically, uh, way too much about each other's sex lives despite never having had sex with each other; it's because not only did Louise basically tell me everything they did, Louise and I also slept six feet away from each other in a shared room for sophomore and junior years of college, and Mike was also over there in her bed half the time. Hence, Mike and I are uncomfortably aware that we both know what went on in the dark. We just don't talk about it.)
We try not to openly acknowledge the weirdness though, because we also both know for a fact that we remain linked and are committed to meeting at least once a year with her parents, usually for the scholarship awards ceremony in her honor at college, and we'll have to continue that until her parents die, or one of us moves out of state. Or one of us dies! Hopefully not as likely, though. The whole thing feels oddly intimate, despite our growing distance from each other's lives, and we have a mutual unspoken agreement to basically never acknowledge it unless absolutely necessary, much like the sex life knowledge thing.
So, Mike' father died a while ago, and because there's apparently only one funeral home that services that section of Assfuck Nowhere Maryland, it's the same one that Louise was waked (woken? laid out?) at. It's... weird. It's very rural, and my clearest memory of it was its shitty parking lot, staring at the closed coffin and wondering what they had dressed her in but being unable to think of a way to ask, and getting cornered by Louise's aunt by the cremation jewelry display and being unable to escape. (This will be significant later.)
This was not something that filled me with anticipation to go to again, but I grimly got a bunch of fancy bread and jams together to give Mike as a "Sorry someone died and I didn't get it together enough in time to send flowers" present since he told me they already had a lot of casseroles, shoved them in the car, put on something suitably dark and subdued that I verified was not something of Louise's, and drove two hours through the pouring rain back to southern Maryland.
Now, I have had my fair share of funerals for the point I'm at in my life, for both relatives and friends and acquaintances, and let me tell you. Yes, funerals are for the living. But they still suck. Like, every now and then if you don't really have an emotional attachment to the person going into the ground or their loved ones, and there's associated drama, they can be interesting. And sometimes if you have the right kind of family and circumstances, someone gets into a fistfight or drunk, and they're briefly exciting. But they're not an optimal way to spend the afternoon, and wakes are even less so. Funerals get you out of work. Wakes don't. But wakes are usually unspoken required attendance as well, so you grit your teeth and drag yourself to the funeral home out of love and honor for the deceased, or the deceased's loved ones. Or, like, if you're afraid the deceased will turn into a ghost and start shaking all your light fixtures if you don't come. Also valid.
Wakes are emotionally more exhausting, I think, because you're not even at the end of the thing, yet. You still have to do the actual funeral. But the funeral at least has guidelines and routines that most folks adhere to. Wakes are more unpredictable. They're the lead up to the main event, where you mostly end up telling the family how sorry you are (or, get told how sorry everyone is for you) and trying to share appropriate memories and milling randomly through a funeral home in order to run the gauntlet with its pit stops of family, casket, not-family people you still have to talk to, maybe another trip to the casket, and then escaping. They're a weird liminal space between the death and everything getting finalized.
Anyway, I'm making my way through a crowd of people I do not know in the least in order to tell Mike I'm sorry his dad is dead, and also here's some bread, when I hear my name getting said very loudly and I realized someone there did know me and I was going to have to make conversation while trying to figure out who they were. Fortunately, I worked it out pretty quickly-it was Louise's aunt, and she cornered me by the same damn place as last time, where there's this simultaneously interesting and depressing display of the various ways you can have your loved one's remains turned into jewelry or some kind of trinket.
So, Louise's aunt (who is actually her second cousin, or something) met me for the first time some years earlier when she and other members of Louise's family had come to our house to pick up Louise for fancy dinner in DC. At the time, I was watching a hockey game and came to the door for introductions in full jersey and beer in hand, with the television on the background. While they were at dinner, Louise's aunt apparently quizzed her for like TWENTY GODDAMN MINUTES on my sexuality. Louise prevaricated like a champ, but eventually her aunt concluded with great satisfaction, "I THOUGHT she had that kind of face."
This surprised me upon hearing-I've got gay face, apparently!-since I didn't even have a properly butch haircut. Like, lady, a hockey jersey and some powerplay cursing isn't exactly lesbian sirens, but whatever. I figured I was never gonna meet her again, so it didn't matter. But of course, I did.
When Louise died, this aunt had been very solicitous of me, both during the wake, and the funeral, and the reception afterwards, and so forth. Now, at the reception, she was a little boozed up but it still seemed a little odd to me how often I was getting hugged and had my hands being held in both of hers (I never know what to do when someone does this to me coincidentally. It's like when I have to do the European double cheek air kiss) and other gestures. There were promises to meet up again, of course they would have asked me to do a eulogy but thought it would have been too emotionally crippling, and a long, fifteen-minute speech on the people Louise chose to surround herself with, and Louise being someone who always recognized quality, and lived in the moment, and so forth.
It took me more than a day to figure it out, but then I remembered something while driving home. This was the aunt who thought I had gay face and was kind of fixated on that topic. I truly somehow did not notice it at the time, but instead of Mike (who was dating someone else by then), I was being treated as the grieving spouse/significant other by most of her extended family.
Which, actually, was not too far off the truth, but I honestly still can't work out if they think I was just holding a secret flame in my heart, or if they think we really did have something going on, or what. Given the fact her aunt is VERY southern and kind of a hardcore conservative, that's probably... nice? I guess? Or she was hitting on me which I think is much less likely. I still get Christmas cards from her!
Anyway, Louise's aunt yet again cornered me by the corpse jewelry, and I had to go through the whole song and dance with her again where she inquired about my life as a still grieving widow, and it was very surreal but also weirdly interesting, which I had not expected to get at a wake. I thought it was going to be normal boring. Louise's extended relatives were the kind of people who refer to the Civil War as The War of Northern Aggression, and who ranted about Obama, and think the COVID-19 vaccine is a government plot to convert us all into Chinese citizens. I have no idea why they seem to make an exception for me in their minds as Secret Gay Face Lover of their dearly departed. Perhaps because until the hockey I had always been fairly polite and rarely loud around them. I think they liked that I owned my own house. They felt I was a solid if unexciting spousal prospect.
I put most of my thoughts on Louise here because no one's on LiveJournal anymore, and I can feel like I'm talking out loud but not bothering anyone. It's like yelling shit at the ocean, or something. If the ocean was a mostly deserted online wasteland populated mostly by Russian bots.
Anyway. It's been seven years. I miss her.