Joker

                The funeral director speaking with us reminds me very much of Gabe from The Office and there’s simply no other way to put it. Too tall, too pale, lanky as hell and uncomfortably suited up. Apparently, the grim reaper wears a cloak to cover up his innate awkwardness. Stop being so tall, huh guy? Dad was only 5’6’’. He could still beat you up though, funeral guy. He was built like a retired bodybuilder, biceps as big as his head and his torso was a rocket ship with a beer belly. My dad had planned smart: if he builds a huge chest when he’s young, his belly won’t jut out when he’s old and that way he can wear old t-shirts and still be comfortable to look at. Speaking of comfortable, my dad would definitely have made a joke by now. Years before I learned to talk and nicknamed him “Dad,” he had earned one of those rare nicknames that become almost as common as your first name while having no relation to the sound of your name. His friends called him Joker, and I would have too, had it not been superseded by the whole “Dad” thing. He was a funny man, the most engaging storyteller you’d ever seen. He would get so excited about sharing an anecdote that made him laugh, because he liked to laugh, he wanted to make you laugh, he wanted to laugh again at the story, as he had so many times before. He would chuckle as he approached the best part, doing all the necessary gestures and voices. The best was when we would recollect a memory together, both trying to get through the laughter. He had to remove his glasses from his face as he wiped tears from his eyes and he convulsed with laughter. He’d put his hands on his knees, guffawing, as if the hilarity was weighing down on his shoulders, like the Hercules of funny stories. “Unbelievable” he would sigh happily, as we came down from the crescendo of buddy laughter, in a voice much too high for a man of his build. You know that pitch you use when you say “oh man” after you experience an exhaustive amount of laughter.

                Thinking about it, this meeting could have been enjoyable with my dad in charge. There was no time for awkwardness for my dad; if a situation wasn’t fun he made it fun or he moved on.  This situation certainly wasn’t fun, so I suppose it is appropriate that he was the one member of the usual immediate family missing. Unfortunately, he is the subject, not the presenter. Instead of Joker we have this joker. I’ll bet the amount of time this guy laughs in a year my dad could double with the opportunity of one conversation with him. My mom has this great story about a guy they knew who never cracked a smile at anything. This was at an early stage in my parent’s marriage where they were involved in that weird, sort-of-a-pyramid-scheme-but-not Amway thing. The point is they were trying to sell their business to this man. Years later, my dad would leave Amway, or whatever they had changed their name to at the time, because it wasn’t fun. Many years after that, my mom would leave my dad, not because of the Amway thing but because they have different ways of viewing life. Anyways, let’s get to the important problem: this guy won’t laugh. So, my dad heads to this guy’s house for a one-on-one meeting. Legend has it that Dad didn’t just get this guy, this emotionless still life of a man, to laugh. My dad has him standing up, literally acting out a scene from The Godfather as they are both tearing up with laughter. Needless to say, skinny funeral director would be no challenge.

                Skinny funeral director is asking us about logistics. Bury him? Burn him? Boil him, mash him, stick him in a stew? Well, this costs this much, but that costs this much, and that costs that on top of that. That is optional (but recommended) but it does cost this much. So sorry for your loss.

“Yes, yes,” sneers a dying man in Guy De Maupassant’s Revenge, “He sends His vultures to the corpses.”

Luckily my grandpa, stoically seated in the sofa to my left, arms crossed, knows what he wants and doesn’t want to hear the options.  To his left sits my grandma: small, religious, adorable. She nods empathetically with the funeral director when he speaks, looking back and forth between him and my grandpa, making little cooing sounds of agreement. Her hands clutch a tissue. Between my grandparents her head about a foot lower, is Ruby, only eleven years old. In a who’s who of who’s in the most tragic position to have Dad die, she is the winner. The tragedy is not due to her being most “impressionable.” The tragedy is that, being the youngest, she has been cheated into the lowest amount of time spent with him. In the other corner of our adversity arena, weighing in at 100 pounds is Rocky, brandishing a quick wit and an innate preteen shyness that now threatens to be a lifestyle rather than a stage. Close to his side is Zoe, who looks different because she isn’t chatting.  Zoe has always been the type of person who loves to be made fun of, which is great, because my mom is not, so to make family games work my Dad and I have to focus on the silly things Zoe says and make sure my mom doesn’t get offended at anything. Mom’s here too, and she should be, she’s worked through adversity her whole life, growing up in foster homes, graduating from college on her own, raising all of us the way she believed was right. I shouldn’t be put off by her presence just because they were divorced, but I am, just a little. She claims that she and Dad had a sort of reconciliation in his short month at the hospital, but this is difficult for me to accept, because my Dad the hospital patient was not my Dad the dad.

Every visit to Med Central Mansfield, I felt like we were test rats sniffing our way through the long white sanitized corridors. At the end of our journey we received the electric shock or the cheese. Either my dad was barely conscious or mostly alert. He was never all there, always had a sort of faraway look in his eyes. That’s what happens when they scoop a tumor out of your brain, they can’t make a clean cut. Some part of you gets lost in the process. Oh, and control over the entire left side of your body, I guess. There were good moments, like when I joked with him about that scene in Talladega Nights where Ricky Bobby sticks a knife in his leg because he believes he is paralyzed. The scene of Dad and I laughing in the hospital about paralysis while Dad could only move the right side of his being was made even more ironic by the fact that Michael Clark Duncan, the big black actor who did a hilarious job in that scene, had died just a few days earlier. When you investigate a family death closely, you find weird coincidences like that all over.

So here I sit, tallest of the family, youngest adult, oldest child, mimicking my grandfather’s posture and countenance. Funeral homes always smell like they’re trying to cover something up, although I suppose that is the point. The funeral home attempts the grim task of taking something ugly and making it beautiful. Everyone knows the stench of road kill – it’s fucking horrible. You’ll be driving down some nameless country road and, no matter how rolled up your windows are, you always smell it before you pass it. The mangy, almost visibly green scent doesn’t even acknowledge the boundaries of your automobile. You look at your car’s airbags and think, my car is supposed to protect me from death but it can’t even shield the smell of it. The funeral home has no recollection of this smell. When your nostrils encounter the stuffiness of that geriatric aura, they clench up your throat in preparation of suffocation. Funeral homes don’t look like death either. That would be a sight. You’re led into the foyer and there hangs a giant portrait of the most gruesome image you’ve ever seen. A young Vietnamese girl drenched in napalm AND/OR Mrs. Jackie Kennedy trying to pick up the pieces AND/OR the grin of the mid-meal cannibal AND/OR heavily interrogated Iraqi citizen, purposefully held so close to death, so close that he reaches and stretches out his useless hand and his fingernails are touching it AND/OR brain tumor AND/OR Aztec sacrifice. None of that. There’s a teddy bear on a small table in the corner with a silky white ribbon around its neck.

I read over what Mom is going to have written in the paper about Dad and my only note is that I am eighteen, not nineteen. She says it’s not a big deal since I turn nineteen in a few days, and I say no, of course it’s a big deal, because my age is representative of me carrying on the legacy, coming of age, etc. The readers of the local paper must know that my first visit to the voting booth was preceded by my first visit to the funeral home. Nineteen? Psh! Nineteen year olds are lazy has-beens who have wasted their opportunity to be eighteen. But eighteen, eighteen is me jutting my jaw out to death with a tear in my eye and my siblings at my side and saying “you are too late. I am old enough to take this. I am young enough to endure this. Hit me and I will hit back.” Observe dwellers of the Mansfield News Journal obituaries! You are witnessing the change from Act One to Act Two! Whisper to each other in anticipation! Gossip with guesses of the conclusion based on foreshadowing clues!

This is no hero’s journey. I will not end up slicing off the head of Cancer with my blade of retribution and bringing it back as a trophy. If anything, this is a rite of passage. I know this as I walk with my family slowly through the literal passage of the what-coffin-do-you-want-to-buy room to the here’s-your-last-moment-with-your-loved-one. This is why we are all here, to see a body, a shell, and act like it is our last moment with him. I am trembling violently. This has to be the slowest I’ve ever approached him; all the times before this have been easy. Past summers come to mind, when I would rush towards him in the shallow end of our local pool and spring my scrawny spidery body onto his shoulders in an attempt to playfully drown him. He would reach his short thick arms around, grab me by my leg and my neck, dunk me once or twice and then fling my body away from him. I would twist my body upright in recovery as Rocky and Zoe followed suit. He just tossed all of us around like we were tiny helicopters and he was pool Dad King Kong. He wasn’t scary though.

He is scary now, and I catch a first glimpse of him under a blanket on a bed in the middle of the room and have trouble standing. I’m gripping the arms of whoever is alongside me as I lead the procession slowly toward him. Tears are shaking out of me and I’m clenching my jaw tighter than humanly possible but I’m taking panicked breaths through my mouth so all the air through my teeth is making the sound of sobbing and hissing combined. He looks fine. He looks like he’s asleep, like at any moment he might sit up and yell “Gotcha!” and it will all be a ruse he planned in some sadistic commitment to his nickname. But no. I reach out to touch his face and he is so cold, so very, very cold. He’s not stiff, his face muscles move around his skull appropriately as if I was touching anyone’s face. His face has become a map of sense memory and I remember all of it. He’s still scruffy around his jaw and his hair is still thick and curly and he’s not wearing his glasses so you can see he still has that scar across his nose that one would assume is just an indent from wearing glasses all the time but he claimed it was from when he was a kid and a dog scratched him across the nose. He’s all of that and I’m just bawling. I am the first to touch him and the first to cry loudly. This allows my siblings to do the same. Being the oldest, I have to set the precedent; I have to do things first so that they know they can copy me. I carve out the boundaries in which they can roam so that they don’t have to walk into the abyss that is a controversial action never done before. Everyone’s crying and holding each other, sometimes in pairs and sometimes in groups. My grandpa leaves before too long, his quiet nature doesn’t accommodate this type of grieving. I make sure to run outside down the concrete steps of the funeral home to his car and hug him, and then run back in to return to the rest of the family. My family is the body of a giant with wounds at every vital point and I am a helpless man running up and down the length of this massive victim trying to stop the blood loss at each part of the body. Back in the tidy room, we are broken.  The room is a symphony of sobbing that heightens and falls every few minutes with me at the conductor’s podium. At one point I am embracing Zoe and I look and see Ruby’s one-on-one moment with Dad. The image is heartbreaking. Ruby, her back facing us, is standing on her tiptoes so she can rest her head on Dad’s chest. Her long hair drapes over the blanket as Dad’s 5’6’’ lies perpendicular to her 4’0’’. The innocence contrasted against the reality crushes and kills me, but it is impossible to look away from. Maybe beauty has a place alongside death after all.

The tragedy circus grand finale is nearing its end. We all say our goodbyes and slowly make our way to the exit. Wait. Wait, I’m not done. I go back to Dad. I have to give him something, something he gave me a long time ago. I can remember very clearly us being in a car at a gas station when I was very small and him telling me a joke that made me laugh for at least ten minutes. It might be one of my earliest memories, and I am so thankful for it and I want to give it back to him. Maybe it’s dumb, but I don’t care. I don’t care if I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife and I don’t care if whispering is going to butcher the delivery. I lean down and press my wet face against his so he’ll be able to hear me and I clutch his arm with one hand and run my other hand through his hair and I hold him as close as I possibly can. All I care about is making him laugh.

So, there are these two guys out hunting in the middle of the woods, okay? These two buddies are out hunting with their rifles. All of the sudden, one of them clutches his chest and falls over. His friend doesn’t know what to do, so he pulls out his phone and he dials 911.

911, what’s your emergency?

Help! Please! I’m out in the woods with my buddy and he just fell over! I-I don’t know what to do, I think he might be dead.

Alright sir, calm down. Now, the first thing you gotta do is make sure he’s dead.

BANG

Now what?