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Paul Hina
Copyright ©2010 by Paul Hina
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Imeros
He can't think of a quiet quite as quiet as a funeral's quiet.
Even though the funeral is outdoors, and spring has only just begun, there is no sound. Jacob expects the sounds of birds, or the buzz of bugs to emerge—something to break the numbness of the warm mid-morning air—but nothing comes.
Then, when there is some errant sound, it feels like an intrusion of the silence death invites.
He hears Gary's wife sniffle and cough. Maybe he can even hear the sounds of her weeping—that heartbreaking sound of breathlessness.
He tries to unhear it.
But then, finally, there is a bird. Its chirping sound uncracks the solemnity in the air. Jacob looks around for it. He spots a cardinal perched on one of the headstones in the distance. It appears to be watching them, staring at this curious spectacle of people. It chirps again as if it were trying to tell them something, but no one other than Jacob is looking. No one else seems to have taken any notice of the bird's seeming urgency.
Funerals have always been a peculiar apex of the post-death experience to Jacob. For some, though, it does seem to be a necessary exercise, enabling them to turn away from the shock of death's immediate aftermath. Looking around now, Jacob can see that everyone still seems to be swimming in the sheer shock of Gary's absence. His body is there—in front of everyone, lying face up—but his made-up face is nothing more than a caricature of a human being. But the reality of his corpse is the stark reminder some people need before they can consciously register his being gone.
For Jacob, Gary was a colleague, and only a dozen years his senior. So, when he first heard that Gary had died it was particularly troubling because it offered one of the starkest reminders of his own death's imminence. And looking at Gary's wooden-faced profile peeking out from that casket does nothing to assuage Jacob's recent thoughts of mortality.
Gary died of a massive heart attack. He was watching television, enjoying a bowl of ice cream alone on his couch, and it must have just smacked him right on the chest. He was never even able to mutter a word of help.
His wife, Carol, found him on the floor the following day. He had probably been dead for hours, and he can hardly imagine the horror she faced that morning.
There are certainly worse ways to go. Rarely is there dignity in the face of death, but, in this case, where there was no long, drawn out agony, it at least left a shadow of dignity—the appearance of a quiet, more serene rattling of the end.
At least his family did not have to watch him die, little by little, day by day, as so many others have watched with their own family members.
Though, in the long run, this is probably little solace to Gary's family. Carol has still lost a husband. And, since he was only fifty-four, she probably just assumed that they would have another twenty or thirty years together. Now, suddenly, the rest of her life has been irrevocably altered from what she thought it would be only three days before.
Death is always the cruelest, and most unwelcome, reminder of life's uncertainty. What always seems like an inevitability is conveniently set aside, looked at as a tomorrow thing. And in the fluidity of our days we tend to forget that it is always there, hanging just above us, waiting to drop. It takes the death of someone near—in age or emotional closeness—to remind us that there is nothing to be counted on.
After the shock, Carol will begin the slow process of coming to terms with this new, altered future, this utter aloneness. And long after the rest of us have climbed down from this apex—this ceremonial celebration of Gary's life—she will still be stuck at the top, surveying the damage, measuring the depth of her loss.
But most people will walk away from the ceremony in a different place, trying to watch their steps as they descend from their mourning. People like Jacob will spend the days ahead in a delicate balance between knowing that they will die and being fully aware that they have this life and should be doing something with it. This experience, even if for just a little while, will make all involved more cognizant of that delicate line of mortality.
Many will walk away from this ceremony wondering how they can cherish life more, or what they can do to make their future lives more full.
For others, they will spend the days to come reflecting on what it is exactly that they're leaving behind.
As for Gary, he has left behind his family, a house, a tenured university professorship, and a nice pension for his wife. But as far as his work is concerned, there is not a whole lot to say. There is, of course, his scholarly work, strewn from one academic journal to another, but these essays were of little consequence.
Gary was no fool. He was aware of his intellectual limitations. He was no great talent, but he was a thoroughly decent guy as far as Jacob was concerned.
Gary and Jacob were hardly more than colleagues. They were never really more than friendly acquaintances, but Gary always seemed interested in what Jacob was working on. Every time they would pass each other on campus, Gary always peppered him with questions about his poetry. Sadly, Jacob hadn't had a whole lot to report recently. He hadn't written anything of consequence in months, and nothing that he felt was particularly important for years.
The last time Gary and Jacob ran into each other in the English building's parking lot, Gary had asked him what he was working on. He remembers telling Gary that he had hit a bit of a rough patch and was having trouble getting anything significant done. Gary just smiled and told him that he'd pull through, and his sincerity was enough to make Jacob believe that he was right.
Jacob never remembers asking Gary what he was working on.
The cardinal is chirping again, and the sun is brightly shining now. The smell of a new spring is in the air—a mix of honey and autumn's thawing mildew. Jacob's wife, Rachael, reaches over and squeezes his hand. He turns and smiles at her—the kind of weak, thin smiling done at funerals.
He realizes that he hasn't been paying a whole lot of attention to the ceremony. Gary's son spoke, and Jacob can hardly recall a word. And now the clergyman is going through the normal 'though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death' business, which seems to have become ubiquitous at these mostly secularized ceremonies.
But Jacob is already in that post-ceremony mode. He's already thinking about what he's going to do with what life he has left. He's already thinking of ways to bring poetry back into his life.
As everyone recites the Lord's Prayer, Jacob looks around at all the heavy, aging faces and watches them mouth the words. Even Rachael, a vehement atheist, is mouthing the Lord's Prayer. But Jacob never got the impression that Gary was in the least bit religious. Then it occurs to him that maybe he didn't know Gary at all. And who here did? Probably his wife. To some degree, his son probably knew him—as much as a child ever knows a parent outside of their roles. But no one else here probably really knew him.
So, what's left behind, other than the quiet a life leaves when it goes?
"How well did you know Gary?" Jacob asks David, another colleague of his from the English Dept. They're picking over a couple slices of pie at a small campus café, still wearing their funeral attire.
"Probably about as well as you did, I suppose. We talked a little from time to time, mostly in passing."
"I was just wondering how well anyone, other than his wife, really knew him. I mean, I knew the guy for nearly fifteen years, and I don't feel like I ever really got to know him."
"That seems like one of those weird existential questions, doesn't it? Can anyone really know anyone else? Hell, sometimes I don't even have t
he slightest idea who I am. Besides, he seemed like a pretty happy guy to me. He seemed like the kind of person who was either comfortable being private, or just wasn't very deep."
"Was he? Happy, I mean."
"Are you really asking for my thoughts about Gary? I just told you I hardly knew the guy."
"I know. It's just that it strikes me as sad that we never really tried to know more about him in all the years we've been here."
"I guess I just never thought he seemed like a very interesting guy. I never considered asking him about his interests because, frankly, I wasn't interested. In fact, out of every one in the English Department I would say that Gary may have been the last person I wanted to learn anything about."
"You don't find that sad?"
"Sad for him, or sad for me?"
"Does it matter?"
"Well, it's not sad for me, and I