'Cigarettes smeared with lipstick'

Cigarettes smeared with lipstick. My mom says she used to like watching my grandmother smoke because of her long, elegant fingers. It was a shock to me to find out my grandma had lung cancer when I was 12 because she had stopped smoking around the time I was born. She had it, though, and hers was the second funeral I attended. My uncle had died of a heart attack 8 months earlier. He was 42 and a lawyer. There were rumors he had a malpractice suit looming over him. I don’t know if those were true. But I remember sitting in my aunt’s living room in a circle with family and friends, either before or after the funeral. A neighbor was talking about her 3 or 4 year old daughter who wanted to get a bunch of helium balloons together so she could fly up and go see Dan in heaven. I cried at that story, tears openly sliding down my face. My cousin told me later she was surprised I hadn’t gotten up and gone into the bathroom. No one needs to see that type of thing was the message.

I don’t know if I still believed in God at that point in my life, but if I continued to after I would have thought he was a cruel bastard. I attended half a dozen funerals between ages 12 and 17. A classmate who was accidentally shot by another classmate, a kid I babysat for who was severely disabled because of a car accident a few years earlier. His dad had taken him along the winding roads toward Horseshoe Bend. No carseat. No seatbelt. The dad survived just fine. The first time I babysat the child and his brother, I heard his parents asking as they left, “Did her friend tell her about him?” I think my friend had, but the parents hadn’t really told me what was going on with their child. “Sorry, we broke him.” They didn’t say that.

A 14-year-old friend I had gone a school trip to Russia with. Killed in the passenger seat when she and her brother were driving to see the new mall, the first mall ever in Boise. On that trip I think she may have been one of the cool girls who teased me but I’m not sure. I don’t think she was, but one of the girls who did make fun of my Garfield pajamas was at a funeral when I was 20. Her sister and her sister’s boyfriend had been killed on the road up to Riggins. A big-rig hit them head-on. Stacey was at her sister’s funeral and I hugged her and hugged her. The boyfriend had been a fellow RA at college. I sat in on one of his shifts that week. His dorm had the smart people in it (the academics, I should say). They were quite docile.

I told my mom at a certain point that I was done being sad and I wasn’t going to cry anymore. This was after my grandmother. It was hard to pull off but I was relatively successful. Mom could always see the strain in my eyes, though.

It was a surprise to me to grow up and realize I wouldn’t be going to a funeral every year or six months. Part of me keeps waiting for the terror to start again. The slow, lumbering, floral-arrangement-and-ham-and-cheese-sandwich-laden terror of another expression of grief without expression. A community coming together to look at themselves and wonder who’s next. I had a theory about the Mormon families I grew up around. They had too many kids. Kids who got hit by cars at 5 and killed, were riding in cars with their teenage friends and killed, were playing with guns and killed. It’s OK, we have a few more. Plenty to go around. 

I wish I had ended on a lighter note. Happy Thanksgiving. :)