It’s Saturday as I write this, and it’s been almost a week since Brian woke me up late one night to say there were police lights flashing outside our window. Since the only thing outside our window is swamp, I told him he had dreamt it and to go back to sleep..when I saw them too. Another police car had pulled up on the main road, to the left of the swamp. Finally, after watching a while, we figured it must be someone getting pulled for speeding, or animal control to pick up a pesky alligator, and went back to sleep. But the next morning, we woke up to find that we had been looking out the window as a young man’s life (on earth, anyway) ended.
A local teenager, who had just graduated from the high school in town and was starting his freshman year here this fall, had been going too fast on the roads (a tempting thing to do, as there’s never any traffic), and lost control of the car, crashing off the road and into one of the many canals. A friend had been with him , and managed to get out of the sinking car and run for help…but too late. The young man, Alex, was drowned and since then, I think the whole town has been in some kind of shock.
Yesterday, there was a wake for him, and Brian and I decided to go as we’re community members now and we wanted to show our support for his family. This is when we realized that we’re FAR from community members. Most of the wake was teenagers weeping inconsolably for the loss of their friend (girls and guys alike), and we felt so out of place that we left shortly after arriving. This morning, Brian showed up at church for the reguarly scheduled confession time only to find a Requiem Mass going on…he awkwardly slunk out. Meanwhile, I went to the fitness room, only to come out to find the whole town congregated in the town center while his caskett was loaded into the hearse.
This whole process has struck me in a number of ways….the first being that we’re so unconnected from the community here that we had no idea most of this was going on, not to mention how we should respond. The second is my general reaction to funerals, and especially viewings, which is that I hate them. Especially yesterday, as several teenage girls were lead up the aisle weeping, I felt that I couldn’t bear that much suffering. By the time I left I too was in tears.
I’m such an empathetic crier that I burst into tears when my 2-year-old niece gets a scraped knee and bawls. I can’t tell you how ridiculous that feels, not to mention a tad embarrasing. At the funeral of one of my elderly clients, I cried so hard her daughter had to console me, instead of the other way around. I don’t know if this is comforting to people (well, at least I’m not the only one crying!) or incredibly offputting, but I know I can’t control it no matter how hard I try. I’ve been to several vigils for people who died while I was in college and whom I didn’t know well, but I always ended up in tears. Although I know that funerals are meant to honor the person who died, I often find them so sad and heart-wrenching that I avoid them at all costs, even skipping the recent viewing and funeral of my Great-Uncle Banks, who died before I left NC .
Is it pure avoidance, or that I prefer to remember people as I knew them alive, a task made easier if I haven’t seen them embalmed? I don’t know. But I do know that if you ever need someone to cry with, I’m only a box of tissues away.
