Lavender

Lavender
G Money

         I had always wondered how I would cope when the moment arrived, and now here I am, standing before a lavender coffin holding my aunt who had just passed away on the holiest of days on the Catholic calendar. I couldn’t escape the irony that He had taken her on the day He supposedly raised his only Son from the dead. It struck me how old she looked, sleeping quietly there in the lavender coffin. Peace at last. She looked the same when we arrived the following morning. I stood in the foyer of the funeral home and stared, not quite sure how to react to the coffin still being open. She was dead, of course, but I wondered if she had been chilled through the night.

         “We need coffee,” Stephen, my eldest brother, said.

         “Fine idea,” Christian, my other brother, agreed. “Interested?”

         “Sure,” I said, even though I hadn’t had a drop of caffeine in a month. My nerves were on edge already at the mere thought of having to help carry the casket up the steps of the church and down the aisle. There was little comfort in the fact that I wouldn’t actually be carrying it down the aisle, but rather standing beside as it was rolled. It was not the day for the twitches to return.

         The sun splattered on the concrete and sizzled on the top of the hurst, and the few cars already in the parking lot. The gentle breeze kept my black suit pants cool as we walked two blocks before spotting a small coffee shop across the street. It was practically deserted. I glanced up at the wall clock. Quarter to eight. I would normally be at work already, sitting in the back, reading yet another book. I had been zipping through books like crazy since I graduated and moved back home with my parents.

         “Want anything Charlotte?” Stephen asked.

         “No thanks.”

         “Sure?”

         “Yeah.”

         “Okay,” he said as he forked over a five while the lady behind the counter began steaming his milk for a latte. Christian had just ordered a coffee.

         The three of us sat down at a table, and the conversation turned to politics. I sat quietly, staring blankly out the window as they talked about the latest developments in Iraq. A particular scene from Shadow Lands flashed through my head. Anthony Hopkins appears at a gathering with university friends shortly after Debra Winger dies of cancer. One of them says that life must go on, and Anthony Hopkins responds that he doesn’t know that it must but it certainly does.

         “We better head back,” I said, glancing up at the wall clock.

         “Yeah. Jesus this sucks,” Stephen said as he gulped the last of his latte.

         The three of us walked the two blocks back to the funeral home, trying to talk about anything other than today. The whole ordeal was hard, but it seemed to pale in comparison to what my dad’s brother and my cousins were going through.

         Her death wasn’t so much of a shock as its swiftness. She had been diagnosed with cancer almost a year before, and fought it tooth and nail, the body and mind presenting a united front that seemed to beat back the incessant cancer. Despite all possible treatments known to man, the tumors gave one last push, spreading the cancer around her insides like hot butter on toast so it seeped into every last crevice. She had gone from bouncing around the house at Jacob’s confirmation a month before, to bed-ridden and struggling to breathe until her body just gave way in the early evening hours of Easter Sunday when everyone else was just sitting down to a wonderful dinner.

         “We’re going to have a little prayer service,” the funeral home director said as my brothers and myself returned. He motioned towards the room that was now filled with people. They all had taken Uncle Frank’s invitation to attend the funeral and filled the small room as they had the night before. My parents were already seated. I moved to an empty chair along the wall closet to the door and sat quietly, listening to the prayers being offered and struggling to keep the tears from streaming down and splattering on the lavender blouse that matched the coffin.

         The funeral home director asked us, and three other cousins I had never met before, to stand in the back. I dug a Kleenex out of my pocket and tried to wipe my nose. Uncle Frank came up to the six of us, his eyes red and puffy, and thanked us. We all gave a unified you’re welcome before he turned the corner and disappeared out the door. All that remained were the six of us, the funeral director and his brother.

         Funerals were a new thing to me. The little I knew about how they went was from various scenes from movies I had seen. Lots of people in black, crying and talking about what a horrible loss. Someone is always angry. Family feuds sometimes erupt and it’s all over in a matter of minutes. What they don’t ever show, and what I wasn’t at all prepared, was the closing of the coffin. I stared in fascination as the funeral director and his brother removed the vases full of flowers, tucked the sheet in and an item that was dangling. I couldn’t make it out, and had wondered why Uncle Frank had placed a cookie-cutter in the coffin. As the brother stepped aside, I could see two envelops that my cousins’ had placed inside. It never occurred to me to bring something. What do you place inside a coffin as a memento to a person you were just getting to know?

         There was a creaking noise as the funeral director stood at her head and closed the lid of the casket. I felt my heart catch in my throat as the lid clasp closed and locked, sealing her face inside its lavender metallic body. She wasn’t just napping peacefully. She was really gone.