Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (12 page)

“I’ll have to cancel my life and spend all my time going on these goddamned traveling funerals. I can see it now. A whole cottage industry springing up for travel agents and writers and all those people in Hawaii who plan those weddings that everyone thinks are so special but are really just like every other wedding in the whole world. It will be a whole new career opportunity for someone.”

“The tape, for crying out loud,” Jill shouts above the new laughter. “Put in the damn tape.”

Katherine obeys and slips in the tape quickly even though they are still laughing. She keeps her fingers on the edge of it, as if she were holding on to the fingers of her daughter who is leaving for the very first day of school. Katherine holds on and keeps her fingertips on the dashboard as they hear Annie Freeman’s voice and they drive toward Santa Fe on the first leg of her fabulous traveling funeral.

At first no one can move or speak and Katherine considers pulling off to the side of the freeway so she can focus on every word, every syllable, every sound from the voice of her dead friend that she hears coming from inside the radio.

“Shit,” Rebecca finally says as Annie Freeman welcomes them to her funeral.

Hey. Did you all make it? I bet you did. I know Marie is probably holding someone’s hand right now but I hope she made it, but I know I can count on you all to have the kind of funeral for me that I want to have. This came to me fast. I would have had my own damn traveling funeral but there wasn’t time. I needed my strength to just breathe and so I am counting on you, counting on all five of you.

My boys helped me plan all of this. It was their penance, I told them, for all the times they were little shitheads when they were growing up. Everything should be in order and there are enough tapes in here for every stop to help you figure out what happened and what I need to have happen now—this one last time.

And women: Please do not be too morose. That would piss me off. I know it must be weird to hear my voice now, to have me lecture you one last time, but think of this as many things and one of them should be to have a damn good time and to get to know the women I loved, the women who you may also come to love during this interesting assignment.
And for godsakes try and get along.
Katherine, don’t be too damn bossy. Jill, get on with it and don’t sulk. Laura, it’s way beyond time to get going and move—and I mean really move on. Rebecca, I’m sorry, honey, about all the loss and death but you can do it, you can. Marie, if you are there, it’s okay, baby, as you would say, to stop and give the baton to someone else once in a while.

Annie does not talk long during the first tape but every second of her short speech leaves each one of the women speechless.

Katherine manages to keep the car on the road until they get to the part about why they are in New Mexico, and then she does pull off the freeway, turns into a gas station parking lot, and turns up the volume. No one asks her why.

After I tried to kill myself when I was in high school, after Katherine saved me, or gave me the chance to save myself, after I had reached into the black pit of a place that was a breath away from death, my parents sent me to a ranch close to where you are headed. It was a residential treatment program for adolescents in a secluded portion of the desert—like there
isn’t
a secluded portion of the desert—and that is where I first chose to live, to really, sincerely live as wonderfully and wildly and boldly as possible for the rest of my life. Too bad the rest of my life was so damn short but I did live it and each one of you helped me to do that.

Annie briefly describes the place where she stayed and the people who flowed into her world all those years ago to show her a new way to think and who remained a vital part of who she was about to become.

“Did anyone know this?” Jill asks, leaning forward from her position behind Laura in the passenger seat.

“She went away,” Katherine answers. “I knew that much because when I went to find her a week after she tried to kill herself her mother told me that she was getting help and that she would contact me when she was ready to come back. I just assumed ‘come back’ meant from the psych unit of the hospital, and when we talked about it later, a long time later, it never came up. Once she decided to live, as you all know, she moved quite rapidly.”

“She apparently never forgot—how could you?” Laura asks without expecting an answer.

“Maybe none of us knew her as much as we thought we knew her,” Jill, the professor, adds quietly. “Maybe she wants us to put all of our knowledge of her together and form this whole new Annie. Maybe it’s like a puzzle.”

That’s when Rebecca passes the funeral book over to Jill and suggests that as they get closer to their first drop-off zone they forge ahead with another journal entry. Jill would rather throw the book out the window. She’d rather sit on it or pass it to Laura, but she also understands the importance of the written word, of getting it down, of leaving something for whoever might need to discover the intimacy and unexpected adventure that can be found in a traveling funeral or so she hopes.

She writes with her eyes occasionally moving toward the fast-moving landscape and the edge of her heart on the voice she just heard coming from the tape.

J
ILL
T
HOUGHT:
How strange to hear your voice. How strange to imagine you alive again, riding in the front seat, making us stop at every landmark, roadside curio shop or for every broken-down old pickup that has pulled over to wait for spare parts. I am trying hard to paw through my own memories to see if I can find any hint of this or of what might have happened here to give you back the flame of your own life. And just now I am thinking about how if someone would have told me a month ago that I would be driving through the New Mexico desert with a group of strangers on a funeral I would have had them enrolled at the same place where we are now headed. Guilty too. Guilty, because in the midst of all this remembering you and missing you, I am falling into this trip and these women . . .

A
NNIE
T
HOUGHT:
How many years ago would it have been? Thirty-eight? Who was I back then? Scared. Tentative about life. Terrified. Uncertain. When I drove down this same highway, my hands were in my lap, my heart flinging itself from one side of my chest to the other in anticipation of something that seemed beyond anything that I might be capable of handling. Now, these women, each one of them traveling into a section of the desert that called to me, changed me, made me as whole as possible—what are they thinking? What will this trip do to them,
for
them? And I hope to hell they lighten up when they put in the tapes, because this is not all that serious. I did the hard part. I was the one who died.

The funeral book makes the rounds and then miles and miles north of Albuquerque when the Jeep has grown silent and its four passengers have lapsed into their own private memories of discussions with Annie about suicide and her programs and the definite joys of moving forward, it is Laura who finally brings up the question that has ridden shotgun with each one of them since they arrived in New Mexico.

“How do we do this?”

“What part of the doing do you mean?” Katherine asks.

“The actual funeral part. I know we are headed to some small roadside hotel but when do you actually want to spread her ashes? Do we do it at sunset? Do we do it at sunrise? Should we do a drive-by? Do we need to plan a ceremony?”

These questions leave everyone with their mouths hanging open because no one is certain. No one knows what should happen next, which is what Laura decides is the best way to deal with their uncertainty.

“Annie was the queen of spontaneity,” she says. “Sure, she was organized and directed, but how many times did she call one of us from someplace like Spain or Canada to say that she ‘just had this idea’ and then took off running?”

“She did it a lot but this is a funeral, for crying out loud,” Rebecca objects. “I’m kind of a free spirit myself but maybe we should put a little more thought into this.”

The pallbearers banter then. It seems, so they decide, that Annie did most of the necessary planning and that their portion of the project should be whatever moves them at the moment—as long as the ashes get flung or spread or dropped where Annie wanted them to end up or in whichever direction the wind blows. As long as there is not too much arguing.

By the time they pull off of Highway 44 and follow Annie’s map down a winding road past two tiny towns and east toward the Bandelier National Monument signs, they are not only into the heart of New Mexico but realizing fast that the first ceremony will have to wait until morning.

“It looks like we have less than two hours of daylight left,” Jill says as they see the first sign for the Ranchero Skyline Inn and Restaurant. “By the time we get there, unload, and eat—if the joint is even open—it will be dark.”

“See how things work out,” Laura tells them. “Apparently we are supposed to get up and do our funeral business in the morning.”

“You could have saved us a lot of time by getting out your magic cards and just telling us this two hours ago,” Katherine chides as they come over a rise and see their inn, a glorious sprawling set of buildings perched on top of a small plateau. There are just a handful of cars and four trucks spread out in the parking lot.

Annie has reserved them the most remote cabin. It is in its own world, several blocks from the restaurant, at the end of a thin dirt road that loops around piles of boulders. It is surrounded by low patches of sagebrush and a few hearty-looking scrub pine trees.

“It’s beautiful,” Rebecca says for each one of them.

Without saying another word, Katherine, Rebecca, Laura and Jill walk around the side of their cabin and move past their parking spot and walk in a line, their funeral procession, and follow a path that takes them to the very tip of a mesa that offers a view of a sweeping valley between two embracing mountains, a long and winding dry riverbed and a sun that is turning the sky the color of a California orange.

“Oh my gawd,” Laura moans. “This is breathtaking. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“The Southwest is amazing,” Jill tells them, standing with her foot on a rock and turning to face her friends. “The light here, it must make artists weep. This is Georgia O’Keeffe country. She lived not so far from here. I think she almost went insane from the colors, the light, everything that you are seeing right now.”

“Look,” Katherine says, pointing down the trail and toward another mesa. “Is that a bench way over there or some kind of sign or something?”

They all squint into the setting sun, leaning like flowers toward the spot on the horizon that Katherine has discovered. They all see it and in an instant they all know. It is just a speck, so small it could be a mile or more away, but it is out there and it has a view and something beyond the view is calling them to go there.

“That’s where we’ll go in the morning,” Katherine decides. “That’s where we must go.”

14

By dawn the light streaming through the cabin window has illuminated Annie’s red tennis shoes and it looks as if they are on fire. Katherine has placed them on the window ledge facing toward the canyons and valleys and mesas that stretch in front of their cabin in endless ribbons of colors and shadows.

Jill is the first one awake and she has the coffee going. She has one foot up on the coffee table and has leaned so far over the edge of the chair a whisper could make her tip over but she is mesmerized by the unfolding of morning in the desert and does not want to miss one blink of a cloud or moving shadow. Her mind is also filled with thoughts of Annie and what is about to happen and how she will feel when it is time to spread her dearest friend’s ashes into the desert dirt that looks as if it whips and blows constantly.

Soon, Rebecca, Katherine and Laura are awakened by the ringing of Marie’s cell phone. Jill grabs it first and Marie, already posted outside of her first client’s house, wants to know where they are and what they are about to do.

“I’m watching the sunrise, Marie, oh, Marie, have you ever been to the desert?” Jill asks, scooting back into her chair and stretching both legs out. “It’s amazing, absolutely amazing.”

Marie is standing behind her car, her knees pressed against the bumper and her eyes on the still-dark sky over Northern California. She wants to be there. There is a mild wind blowing cool air off the top of the hills directly outside of Willard Mantavani’s backyard. Willard, who even in his dying moments asks Marie to wheel him outside so he can smoke a cigarette during this early time of the day and watch the clouds rumble east.

Marie, always the caretaker, thinks of Willard first and of his lungs with its holes the size of eraser heads and all the hundreds and hundreds of cigars and cigarettes he must have smoked to turn the inside of his body black and dark as the death that is slowly climbing its way toward the rest of his body. She lets him smoke. He loves to smoke and that is all he has left now—the smoke and the morning sky that he watches as if he were monitoring a parade, breathing through his mouth in between puffs and holding on to Marie’s hand as if she were his mother.

“Tell me,” she says to Katherine. “Let me close my eyes and tell me what it looks like, please. I want to think about it this morning as I take care of Willard.”

It is Jill who tells her as the other women rotate to the shower and grope for coffee cups. She hears a bit of an argument between Rebecca and Katherine about the order of the use of the bathroom and smiles. She steps outside the door, closes it, and lets the morning air touch her face and hands and arms, and then she tells Marie about the wind shifting off the mesas and the way the light bounces but never seems to stop as it pushes from one landmark to another. She tells Marie that she has never seen anything like this and she could understand, standing in this one spot, how a vision like this could make you want to alter your whole life. Jill tells Marie about the countless hues of reds and oranges and how suddenly a swatch of green will appear and then vanish into a small shadow. She tells Marie that in New Mexico the sky is so huge that it’s blinding and the stars look like gigantic buildings.

Marie listens and she thinks she can see exactly where Jill is standing. She bows her head, and she sees.

“Tell me about the cabin and everything, tell me everything,” she begs.

Jill tells her and Marie puts it all inside of her mind. The winding road, the creaky narrow beds, the scrubbed floors, the cowboy decorations and the six-pack of beer in the small refrigerator. She tells her about the few petty arguments, discussions really, and about how everyone is staking out their territory and trying not to be terrified about what they are doing. “Oh,” Marie sighs when she is certain she has it all. “It sounds challenging and lovely all at the same time.”

Jill laughs and tells Marie how they have not planned a thing. She says that they are letting it happen because that’s what they have decided Annie G. Freeman would have wanted.

“In the words of our Rebecca, I would have to say ‘No shit,’ ” Marie tells Jill, laughing and then turning to see that Willard has spied her and is pointing at the California sky with great determination. “Willard needs me now,” Marie tells her. “I am going to have to go and I won’t be able to call back for a while.”

“Is there something you want me to say?”

Marie stumbles around inside of her heart for a moment. She thinks about the bright red shoes and about the traveling funeral and of everything she has already said to Annie. She isn’t sure what she would say if she was standing on the mesa, if she was actually there, if she was a physical part of the funeral. She’s trying hard to make it to Florida. The other women know that but not being there is surely not the same.

“Listen, Jill . . .”

“It’s okay, Marie, she would have known. She did know.”

“I’ll say something from here. But can you do one thing for me?”

“Name it. Anything.”

“Bring me a rock or a small branch of sagebrush or something like that from each stop until I get there. Can you do that? It’s silly, but can you do it?”

“It’s not silly and of course I can do it.”

Nothing will ever be silly again, Jill realizes as she goes back inside to round up the rest of the funeral procession.

The first Annie G. Freeman traveling funeral procession starts inside the cabin when Jill picks up the shoes and tucks them back into their cardboard shoebox home.

Before they leave, everyone straps on their red high-tops, including Katherine, who picked up a pair at the very last mall at the edge of what at the time seemed like nowhere, on the way to the cabin. Their red handkerchiefs are wrapped around heads, arms and necks.

“Ready, funeral warriors?’ Katherine asks as she turns to face Jill, Rebecca and Laura.

“One second,” Rebecca begs. “Let me do my entry. It’s driving me nuts. I just want to get it out of my head and onto the paper.”

The women wait outside while Rebecca sits at the small table near the refrigerator and writes as quickly as possible.

R
EBECCA
T
HOUGHT:
If there was ever a time to say “shit,” this is the moment. We are about to throw your ashes off a cliff, throw your brittle bones to the wind, and I am a bundle of remembering, remorse, sadness, happiness and expectations. Last night when we all stayed up, drinking the beer and talking about you, it reminded me of summer camp, a great adventure, and that is what I am thinking about now as my new friends pause out in the morning sun and wait for me to carry my share of a casket that does not exist.

A
NNIE
T
HOUGHT:
I was scared, too. Fourteen years old, just out of the hospital, still thinking about death. So alone. A kid from the Midwest startled by the sudden brilliance of the Southwest. Do they see what I saw? Do they know how important this place was to me? Will they laugh as well as cry? They had better. Go, Rebecca. They are waiting.

The women, unaccustomed to the fast and furious heat of the desert, quickly begin leaving a trail of clothes as they march in line, down the dusty trail they imagined a young Annie treading years and years ago.

They are silent, their eyes scanning the horizon and watching as the sun gets higher and then hotter every single second.

Katherine stops every few minutes to shift the box from one hand to the other and then she announces that it would be good if they all took turns carrying the shoes to the edge of the cliff.

In the desert, they quickly realize, one mile is really probably two, and they walk for a long time on a path that snakes its way past clumps of bushes, rock outcroppings, and enough sagebrush to make Martha Stewart happy the rest of her life.

“This is one long-ass trail,” Laura says about halfway through the trek. “I hope my shoes hold up.”

They all laugh and they walk on, trudging through their own memories and occasionally thinking that if they have to go to a “regular” funeral ever again they will never be able to sit still through it.

When they come to the cliff edge, the trail passes off to the left and they can see it winding for what they assume, now that they have walked two miles, is about another three thousand miles right to the edge of a blue range of mountains that are off to the west and most likely in East India.

“Jeezus,” Katherine announces. “You could walk forever out here.”

“Yes, you could. I suppose some people have,” Jill says. “I bet there are bones all over this desert.”

“Knock it off,” Rebecca shouts from her position at the end of the funeral procession. “We are in church, for crying out loud.”

This gets everyone thinking for a second and in an unrehearsed ballet they all raise their heads about an inch higher and look around.

“This is what a real church should look like,” Laura announces. “Open, beautiful, a simple yet absolutely magnificent place for your soul to air itself out—or whatever it is you care to air out.”

“You sound like Annie for the good goddess,” Katherine shouts back. “You know how she felt about organized religion.”

“Really,” Laura adds earnestly. “Some of the most glorious and moving experiences I ever had were in places that had to be created by something or someone who had a power that I have yet to comprehend.”

“Get ready for one more,” they each say silently as Katherine leads them off the path and onto a ledge that would have room for only tiny Marie if she had been with them.

“What do you think?” Katherine asks.

“Perfect,” Jill and Rebecca say at the same time.

The women wait silently for just a second and then Laura talks first. She thinks they should honor the girl/woman who was Annie when she stood right in this same spot, or close to it, all those years ago when she was deciding who she was and what she wanted to do with the person she would be.

“Clearly, Annie came here and decided to live, to let go of whatever it was that was holding her in place, or trying desperately to drag her to a place that was darker than anything I have ever known,” Laura explains, speaking not just to her friends but to the world of spirits and ancient voices she imagines still inhabit the world where she now stands.

Katherine talks next. She recounts the month when Annie returned and how it was clear something had happened because it seemed as if even the color of Annie’s eyes had changed.

“They were light, she was light,” Katherine remembers out loud. “She had lost a great deal of weight, her hair was streaked with strands of blonde that I now know came from this wild sun, but she was also peaceful, so peaceful.”

They all imagine Annie as a teenager who had just tried to take her own life. Annie standing on the very edge of the world and still having the capacity to make that choice, to dip backwards and not fall forward, to slip away and never come back, to hike to the far end of the trail and mingle her bones with the bones of everyone else who had done the same thing.

“The view would have blown her away,” Rebecca said. “She would have dropped to one knee, then to the other, and she would have been breathless for a while.”

Something had happened to Annie then. Maybe, they all imagine, maybe an eagle—a bird of greatness and hope—flew from a hidden nest and whispered in her ear. Maybe one of those magical desert rainbows paused in front of the closest mountain and Annie thought she could touch it, or maybe she simply saw that the world was filled with endless choices, endless places, endless opportunities.

“She cried,” Katherine states as if she is talking about herself. “She would have cried quietly after she made the decision. It would have been like a bath, a cleansing moment, and after that she would have had a burst of energy that launched her back into my life and toward each one of you.”

They are all silent then as they imagine Annie G. Freeman in 1968 with her tattered jeans, long dishwater-blonde hair and the somewhat ratty green sweatshirt that she wore constantly. Hiking boots, the hint of musk on her neck and the weight of the world on her shoulders.

When the moment passes, Jill asks if they think she really might have been at this same spot.

“Shit, yes,” Rebecca says. “She knew that we would follow her scent. She stood right here. And something wonderful happened here, just like something wonderful is happening to us now.”

“Katherine.” Jill takes a small step forward because to take a larger one would send her off the cliff. “This is your spot too. This is where you played big in her life and I think you should send her off here. Can you?”

“Can I?” Katherine asks herself softly but still out loud. “Can I?”

Before she does anything, Katherine asks each woman to touch the shoes, “Just like they do in church before they take the casket away,” she explains to them and as they do this Jill bends down to pick up a long white stone for Marie. They touch the red tennis shoes and they each have a thought of Annie, young, beautiful, alive—
alive.

Katherine unlaces the red shoes and unties the tidy plastic bag full of ashes that rests inside one. Jill tips the shoe slightly so that the ashes flow into the palm of Katherine’s right hand, ashes as soft as the desert air. Without asking or saying a word, each one of the women dips her fingers into the ashes, takes a little, and then as Katherine turns and throws her hands into the soft morning wind, the women, Annie’s friends, her female family, do the exact same thing.