A Funeral

I hate open casket funerals. Grandpa looks more alive now than he did before he died. His hands are fastened together on his chest over a smart black suit jacket. They’ve tastefully applied rouge to his cheeks, like the final flush of life. And if you stand still and stare into the casket for long enough, your imagination begins to falsify the imperceptible rise and fall of breath. It would be the first time in years that grandpa was able to breathe without a cannula. My dad places grandpa’s glasses on him; they’re wire-rimmed and were last in fashion in the 70s.

The funeral home is nice. The casket has an enormous bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers that say, Loving Family. Dad stands vigilant by the antechamber rotely greeting guests. There is a box of tissues in the middle of the front row, perched by itself on a chair between my dad and his three brothers. I wonder if the funeral home put it there, or if my dad was prescient enough to bring it. The funeral home is playing “classical” instrumental covers of pop music. I think I’m the only person in the room young enough to pick up the melody of “Dynamite” by K-Pop group BTS. There are worn, mismatched, squashy, brocade couches lining the rectangular room like a row of teeth. The doors have a seal on them, and every time someone opens the door the vacuum of the seal smacks like a sharp round of applause.

“Are you Brian’s daughter?” A woman in her mid-fifties approaches me. “I’m Tina. I’m a part of the Pulmonary Fibrosis Facebook group your grandpa was in.” She shakes my hand, her hand cool like a river-chilled stone. “Peter was a pillar of the PF community—he was always advocating for us, and was a great friend.” Grandpa had spoken about the Facebook group on occasion, but I had never imagined him a “pillar of the community.” I wonder how many funerals Tina goes to as the head of a terminal illness support group.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Tina bids me goodbye and moves on.

The men stand at the front of the room around the open casket talking about fixing garage doors and buying propane for backup generators. The women sit at the back. The music is so loud that I can only hear the group I’m next to. I awkwardly haunt both sides, wanting to be near my dad but repelled by the corpse.

My mom pulls me to sit on one of the camelback couches. After her flight from Thailand two days ago she had told me, “I knew him for 27 years. He was like the father I never had.”

She whispers in my ear in Thai, “They do better makeup on corpses here.” “What, in America? I didn’t know Thai people did open casket funerals.”

“Yes, on the first day of the three—or five. They show the corpse for the family. You’ve never seen it, have you?”

“No, but—Thai people, we cremate, right?”

“I think it’s the weather; people don’t keep as well in the heat. It’s better here in the cold.”

I have only ever been to one Thai funeral. It was for my great aunt’s husband. I was six and had never met him. I fought my mom about putting on a black dress and made us late. We attended the last day of the funerary rites in an unwalled temple. It was the height of the hot season, and the misting fans feebly circulated the air around the space. Because of our lateness we sat in the back. There were like a hundred people in attendance.

When the cremation began, I was pulled out from the nominal shade of the temple and into the plaza. I complained a little, feeling sticky and hot in my black dress. The pyre was white and gold, Buddhist funerary colors. The monks carefully stoked the fire. They prayed, a sharp chant like the buzzing motor of a water bus on the Chao Praya River. My great aunt and second cousins stood around the growing flames. I was envious of their white clothes and cloth parasols. The fire grew, starving and wild, charring and eating at the white casket. The stilts that held up the crown of the funerary pyre collapsed in on themselves with an awesome crash. The swooping golden eaves, like the graceful neck of a naga, and the sharp gold spades in the shape of sacred fig leaves tumbled into the burning pile.

“Ai, look away,” my mom whispered to me. But it was too late; the fire consumed. In the flames I could see the outline of the skeletal corpse burning away, releasing his soul from its vessel to be reincarnated.

Later, my great aunt will receive a tooth that survived the cremation as a gift from the temple.

This ceremony starts and I’m sitting in the second row, right behind the tissue box. I angle myself so I appear to be facing the casket but use my dad’s head to block the view.

We asked for the same chaplain who officiated Grandma’s service in 2021. I’m not sure grandpa has been to church in decades. The chaplain is in his 60s, and he’s wearing a clergy collar and a white stole. He holds a small leather-bound Bible in his right hand; candy-colored Post-it notes stick out of it like rainbow tassels. I wonder how many funerals he does a week.

“And Jesus Christ told us that in his Father’s house there are many mansions. Jesus is preparing a place for Peter, an eternal house, not built by human hands.” I don’t remember Jesus being mentioned this often in Grandma’s ceremony. “And when you look to the world and see Peter in the breeze or in the morning air—” For a moment I think there will be relief from all the Jesus talk. “—know that he is already with Jesus and Joyce in the city that is to come. For he has returned, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

I stand outside the funeral home waiting for the procession to begin. The funeral home is a large, colonial, Pennsylvanian stone house and sits not two hundred feet from the Delaware River. There are so many stone buildings in PA. I wonder why; I bet grandpa would’ve known. Mom comes to stand by me.

“Your dad went all out—I didn’t know you could hire bagpipers for funerals.”

“Hmm, it’s how my great-grandparents met—I think—great-grandma was a highland sword dancer; she took bagpiping lessons from great-grandpa.”

I stand by the car and stare across the river at New Jersey, and it starts to rain in an appropriately funerary manner.

I visited grandpa two days before he passed. The first night in Pennsylvania I was afflicted with this awful headache. I foraged the house, searching for pain relief meds when I saw them. It’s been years since she passed, but there they were, two pairs of small, pink orthopedic sneakers, a cut of spring tulips left on the bottom shelf of the mud room. They must’ve been moved because they weren’t by the front door; maybe it would have been ghoulish to keep them there. Maybe one of us would have thrown them out. I wonder if grandpa moved them, unwilling to see them every day but unwilling to throw them away. I moved away from the stinging scene in the mud room, searching for relief.

In my grandfather’s house there are many rooms, rooms that hold TVs that no longer work, extra mattresses that create lean-tos in the living room. In his driveway there is a red Ford Probe, sun bleached and flat-tired, that he swore he’d fix one day. There is a side table that contains 120 Celtic and bagpiping records, but no record player. There is a chest of drawers filled with plastic bags, and there are bins filled with birthday cards. Under his bed there is a wooden board screwed into the box springs. I open a hallway closet, and there are storage boxes labeled “makeup” and “baking” and others with lacy, easter-colored socks. My headache deepens. I was just trying to find some meds.

“Good afternoon and welcome to the Washington Crossing National Cemetery. At this time military honors will be rendered. There will be a three-volley salute. Please prepare yourselves for loud rifle fire.” The man speaking is in his thirties, has a military cut, and is wearing slacks with no socks. We’re seated on wrought-iron benches in a gazebo. I look behind us at the cemetery; each tombstone is perfectly equidistant from the next like an orchard of marble thumbs that peek out from the earth, and they cover the two hundred acres of hills like halftone print. The wind picks up, the rain bearing down. Grandpa’s casket—now thankfully closed—is draped in a heavy American flag. It’s been moved against the only wall in the structure. The wall is made of the limestone, with circular gold plaques of each branch of the military lined up above him.

Fifty feet to my left three sailors in dress whites hold rifles. On a signal, they aim at the sky and fire, aim and fire, and fire. Gunfire is simultaneously much louder and much more disappointing than I imagined.

Two of the sailors fold the flag lengthwise, stripes over stars, and then lengthwise, stars visible, and then in triangles, and triangles, again, and again. Their white gloves whisper against the thick cotton of the flag, until all that’s left is a tricorn of stars. “On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Navy, and a grateful nation, please accept this—” One of the sailors kneels in front of my dad, a proposal of spent cartridges and Ol’ Glory “—a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

The bagpiper begins to play. He stands ten feet closer to us than the riflemen; he’s wearing highland dress. I twist my hands in the spaces between the cold metal of the bench as the opening notes of “Auld Lang Syne” play, and I remember Thanksgiving dinners at the Pennsylvania house, the dining table dressed up in a white tablecloth stained with decades of Thanksgivings. “We will say the Selkirk Grace,” Grandpa would say, “as written by the Poet Laureate of Scotland, Robert Burns.”

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be Thankit!

I have air but cannot breathe. A cool wind cuts through the gazebo.

For auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

My hair paddles in the burn of my tears. My mouth is salty. The sharp, buzzing chant of the pipes close out.

And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

“It was a good service,” Dad says. He looks to me. “It was good.”

My face is tacky and cold where my tears have dried. “Do you want me to do something like that for you? A military funeral?”

“No, no way. You should plant me under a tree or something. I hate open casket funerals.”

“But the bagpipes?”

“Yeah, do the bagpipes.”