Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (25 page)

He hoped, David said, so much that he waited in the parking lot of the funeral home until Ann’s car pulled in, and they were cordial to each other and she was one of ten people who showed up for the funeral and then he invited her to come back to the house where she ended up being stranded and they talked all night.

There is a pause, when David shifts his weight and when the crowd pushes in, and Jill reaches over to pat the shoebox, and then he continues.

“We’ve been married twenty-seven years, Ann and I, and there is not one person who knows us who doesn’t think that my grandmother had something to do with our getting back together,” he says. “Things happen at funerals. It’s some kind of cosmic, absolutely cosmic, spiritual process that helps maneuver fate and challenges the hearts and souls of people to step up for crissakes, step up and get on with it.”

The crowd goes wild and people begin raising their hands as if they were in class. “Oh, oh . . .” some of them are shouting, softly, but they are shouting. There are suddenly funeral stories fanning out in the crowd three rows back, like a sail that has caught the wind and moves from top to bottom in a gentle push.

“Let’s go,” the women all seem to say at once as they widen the circle, leave Annie in the center and listen. Katherine, the consummate leader, the funeral director, the one in charge, selects the speakers.

Marie, who completely understands this rich connection between the dying and the living and then the dead and the living, sits back and listens in wonder. She listens with a small piece of her mind rotating back just a few days, before the funeral, and it makes her wonder while David speaks what else she has missed by feeling she needed to be so tied in place.

There is a woman toward the back who rises when she speaks. She has on a dark blue business suit and she’s kicked off her shoes and undone her hair. Her story unfolds in a way that keeps everyone spellbound and she cries as she tells it. Her brother was killed in a car accident when she was fourteen years old. She said the tragedy devastated her parents so much that she ended up living with her aunt and uncle because her mother started drinking and her father left. She said from the time she was fourteen she attended a succession of funerals that were like stacked blocks that fell one after another after her brother died. Brother. Grandmother. Mother. Another grandmother and then her father. Funerals, she told them, became a part-time job.

One day, the blue-suited businesswoman drove herself to the cemetery where it seemed as if her entire family filled half of the space, and was strolling from one gravesite to the next when she literally walked into a woman who was kneeling in front of another marker. The woman was grieving for her daughter, who died the same week as the woman’s brother. The two women talked, standing in the shadow of a mausoleum that was covered in ivy that scratched them as they leaned into it. They talked for five hours, exchanged phone numbers and then left.

“She became the mother I always wanted and needed,” the woman, who finally identifies herself as Sally, shares with this crowd of strangers. “I moved in with her, she and her husband put me through college, and I owe them everything, everything.”

The women sit up after Sally’s story and like the crowd around them, quickly become mesmerized by what is happening. Another woman from the group, which is still growing, rushes off to the concession stand and buys coffee, beer and water, and has her children deliver the drinks to everyone sitting in the circle that now stretches out into the walkway where no one is moving anyway.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Laura whispers into Jill’s ear. “What has Annie done now? Look around. This is totally amazing.”

Jill looks around and sees a sea of faces hungry for more funeral stories. Hungry to listen and talk and funnel something—whatever they have been keeping in their own personal casket—back to life, back to
now
. Everyone needs some life food.

David has hauled out a notebook and is busy taking down notes. He looks as if he has discovered gold. Jill winks at Katherine, who mouths “Oh my God” across the circle, and she and Jill turn to look at Balinda, Laura, Marie and Rebecca. They feign innocence but they all know that Annie’s funeral, their constant energy, the closed tarmac, and cosmic forces that have aligned to bring this fine group of travelers to their knees have helped to create this sacred and beautiful slice of time. Their smiles and nods encourage the storytellers; the courage of sharing rises like heat on a Miami Sunday.

And thus the stories go on and on.

I met my husband at my best friend’s father’s funeral. . . .

When my girlfriend was killed in a car crash the year I was sixteen, my whole life came into focus. I became a minister and now when someone dies, when there is a loss, a hollowing out of that place, that deep long tunnel of sadness, I feel as if I can go back and help in a way I might never have been able to help if I had not experienced death and grief at such a young age. . . .

My mother turned to me while we were sitting in the church just as my grandpa’s funeral was to begin and said, “You are adopted.” I was twelve and I looked at her as if she had just told me she was going to run off and join the circus. Why she picked that moment I will never know. Later, she helped me find my birth mother and we discovered that she had been at my grandpa’s funeral with her husband who knew him from work. She looked at me, knew instantly that I was the daughter her parents had made her give up in high school, and she followed us home and then waited. Funerals are something that I am never afraid of and my life was never the same after that day. . . .

Sometimes, when I feel so lonely I could roll up and die myself, I pick up the newspaper and then I go to a funeral where there are very few survivors listed. I pray for the deceased and the living. It makes me feel good and I think it makes the other people who are there happy. . . .

I know lots of people who have gone to funerals and met someone—a former girlfriend and they get back together—or someone from high school’s mom who was really nice to you and then you meet someone there. I did that. When my old coach died I went to the funeral parlor just before the service at church and his daughter came up to me, we were both married, but later when we were not married we got together because after the funeral I kept her phone number in my wallet. I guess I always loved her. . . .

Someone else gets up to get more drinks and finally a well-dressed man at the edge of the crowd whispers to the man behind the bar at the concession stand and an entire drink cart is wheeled out and placed at the edge of the widening traveling funeral. It is like a private party that really isn’t private at all.

Katherine turns to face every person who speaks and as she moves, her shoulder brushes against the box of ashes and reminds her why they are on the floor of the airport and where they have been and what is actually for real and true and happening at that very moment, and the nudge from the box feels like Annie’s hand on her shoulder and it makes her smile.

It makes her smile and remember her frayed bra and the morning just two and a half weeks ago when she answered the door that now seems as if it was a year ago, a decade ago, something that happened before she was born. This thought passes through her mind when a little girl climbs on what Katherine presumes is her dad’s back and says: “If my mommy dies I’m not going to the funeral.”

Everyone laughs but then a whole new discussion breaks loose. A discussion about the place where funerals are held and how we honor tradition, and why—with so many of our parents and friends and selves on pause and in a position to be ready for a personal funeral—it took Annie G. Freeman for so many people to see there are so many fine and glorious ways to honor the dead—yes—
THE DEAD
—such a horrible, terse and final word but it is what it is—outside of the curtained walls of a fine but remarkably dull funeral home.

And Marie tells her story. She talks with such compassion about the months and days she spends with her ill patients and how she can see the lives of her patients flash like short films through their eyes. She talks about the importance of forgiveness and of letting go and for being a presence that does not intrude on a very important process.

“It’s tiring,” she admits maybe for the first time out loud in a very long time. “It’s tiring and you have to be careful so that part of you does not die too.”

There are a few more stories, really just two, from the crowd that has frozen itself to the Annie G. Freeman gate at the Minneapolis airport.

One man who has a face that radiates kindness has been waiting to speak. He is sitting close to the circle on a chair, lined up to see the television screens and the sky where there is not one plane in sight. The women all guess him to be close to eighty years old and he has a habit of pushing his hair back from his face with his hands every few seconds, and then nudging his glasses up onto his nose when they slip down.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he begins slowly, “and I have no idea why I am about to tell you now except maybe it’s because you all seem so nice and we are stranded here and there’s no place to go.”

He hesitates as if he is trying to decide at the last minute if he should move forward or stay right where he is and when he looks up in that moment of hesitation and sees a small sea, a tiny lake really, of asking eyes and hearts wondering what he could have to say to them about death and dying and funerals, he decides he has absolutely nothing to lose with this crowd of traveling funeral-goers.

“Well, some might think this is silly, but my wife—my wife Pauline—she’s been dead for six years now and every single night I sit down in our living room, just like we used to sit down, and I have a glass of wine and an entire conversation with her just as if she was sitting there and we were talking.” He closes his eyes as he speaks so he can put himself right inside the living room. “Oh, we loved to do that. We loved to sit and have our wine and talk and share every night and I miss that so much and that is how I remember her and what we had.”

There is a quiet moment and then the group claps softly, not loud, just the gentle tapping of fingers against the palms of hands slowly while the words “That’s lovely” and “How beautiful” parade from the floor to his ears.

A young woman across the room smiles at the kind man. She waits for the applause to stop and then she says that being stranded at the airport like this is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She’s sitting on the floor with her long legs crossed and tucked up under her, and she’s crying. It looks as if she has been crying for a very long time.

“I’m on my way to my mother’s funeral,” she tells them. “She died just last night, before I could get there, before I could say goodbye, before I could just look into her eyes one last time and tell her something, tell her maybe just one thing that I have needed to say for a very long time.”

The woman sitting next to her reaches out to put her arm across her shoulders and everyone can hear her say, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll say it anyway when I get there,” the young woman continues, looking up and into the eyes of everyone who is listening. “I’ll tell her I love her, and why I was never able to say it when she was alive will be part of the traveling funeral I take with me until I can figure that out.”

Enough,
Katherine finally decides.

She stands with the shoebox under her arm and directs the group toward celebration. Waving her free hand across the room, she orders everyone to their feet and to their drinks and to a junction where they can hold their lost loves in a place of honor and delight.

“Our Annie could only take so much sadness,” she explains. “On your feet, dance if you must, celebrate the life that was before the death and what it gave you and what you have even now.”

Then the Minneapolis airport does just that. While a staggered line of airplanes waits under dark clouds that serenade an entire afternoon, a rumba line snakes through one concourse after another driven by one woman wearing red high-topped sneakers, with four wearing identical shoes scattered throughout the line, and one hanging on to the back end with the ashes of Annie G. Freeman bouncing gently under her right arm.

27

It is 6:30
P.M.
and four hours past the time when the traveling funeral should have touched down at the Seattle-Tacoma airport and departed for a small road trip to the ferryboat dock and a ride to an island not far from the last boat landing.

“What are they saying on your end?” Marie, who is standing with her hands over her ears because the entire airport seems to now be engaged in dancing, drinking or some other fancy form of waiting that has spun off from the funeral discussions and the brazen talk just a few hours before, asks her husband.

“You may never leave the airport,” he tells Marie, laughing before he hangs up. “From the news reports I have been hearing, all the airports are a mess from here to Minneapolis.”

Katherine confirms this news and says that airport officials are hopeful that as soon as the storm passes they can begin sending planes out and receiving them from the West Coast but the snarl of backlogged planes could mean delays for hours and hours—maybe even a day.

“Look through those papers Annie sent you,” Marie orders. “Is there any kind of contingency plan in there?”

“I think that’s what she wanted us to figure out,” Katherine replies. “We’ll have to make some kind of decision soon about what we do next. I bet Annie wasn’t focusing on one more thing messing up her plans and I’m thinking that we can probably hang just a bit longer and then decide. What do you think?”

Marie wants to say that she’s tired of thinking and even more tired this moment of doing. She’d like to say how the funeral break was this huge beaming light at the end of her week, the week before and two years before that. She wants, right this very second, to lie down right where she is and have someone put a blanket over her. She’d like to have her feet tucked in and a warm drink right next to her right hand. She’d like to take a really long nap and know that it doesn’t matter when she wakes up and she’d like her entire family to be locked inside of the house while she dozes so she knows they are all safe and she won’t have to worry about them.

“Marie?”

“Sorry,” she answers. “I was dreaming that I had nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep and be, well, Marie.”

Katherine laughs and asks her if she’s tired.

“Like the rest of the women in the world, yes, I am tired but it’s not anything this break in my routine can’t take care of for a while anyway,” she explains. “So?”

So, they decide to wait just a bit longer and see if they can get a flight out or if they should find a bus or take the train or maybe just walk.

“I’m a good waiter,” Marie tells Katherine. “In a way it’s kind of exciting not to know what is going to happen next. So many parts of all our lives are predictable.”

“Absolutely, especially the past few weeks,” Katherine agrees as they decide to just wait it out a bit longer.

Marie leaves to tell the others they are just hanging for a while and Katherine finds a chair by the window and sits, alone, with Annie’s ashes on her lap and her ankles crossed so that her red tennis shoes can bounce against each other. She knows she’s guarded the ashes and Annie’s place in her life with what she hopes has been a fine mix of seriousness and frivolity up to this point and she decides, just then, at that moment that she is also tired and yes, Marie, it would be wonderful to lie down and take a nap.

Which is what she does suddenly and without any thought beyond the tiredness that has grabbed her by the back of the neck and seems to push her down into the next seat. Katherine rolls her hips into the most uncomfortable chairs ever designed, pushes herself against the shoebox and falls asleep so fast she does not feel her left foot drop or the blanket from inside the bag of the mother next to her slide gently around her shoulders.

She dips into a place of dreams so fast it is amazing that she was able to walk to the chair and sit down without falling into a coma. Her legs jump, and the woman—the mother next to her who was a witness at the recent airport funeral and who wept when everyone told their stories—touches her as gently as she touches her own babies when they dream and move at night so that they will know they are safe and they can feel the anchor of her arm holding them.

Katherine goes far away and she travels past faces that are familiar and into a zone that is a dark tunnel of strangeness. She is trying hard to find someone. Who? She doesn’t know who. And as fifteen and then twenty minutes pass, her leg movements become stronger and she starts to move her hands so that the shoebox begins slipping and very nearly falls to the floor.

The woman, Gretchen Smith, a pediatric nurse from Seattle who will eventually end up on the same plane as Katherine and the others and who will ask for help during the flight when her daughter gets ill and who will also slip a book into Katherine’s carry-on bag that is her textbook—the one she wrote on death and dying when the patient is young—so damn young—catches the box, Annie’s ashes, and then holds them just as gently as Katherine would have as the next forty-nine minutes Katherine sleeps and searches for the mystery person.

In her dream, Katherine has to climb up something very tall and she cannot rest. She moves as fast as she can and even though she does not know where she is supposed to be she’s desperate to get there. Later, when she is also on the plane and she finds the book tucked into her bag and the note that says:
Letting go does not have to be just because of a death. People lose many things they once believed they would have forever. I am certain, without ever having met her, that Annie would have told you the same thing and she would have been there when you let go of the rope. Let go. I guarantee that you will not fall. Your new friend—Gretchen,
she will remember the dream and will jump back inside of it to see what she is supposed to see and what that will bring her is something new, something that is not yet even a thought, something that might never have come to her if she had not been on a traveling funeral and asleep in an airport in Minnesota.

It will come to her months later when Gretchen calls and when they meet for lunch and when they become friends who connected during a traveling funeral and when Katherine finally realizes that she is ready to discover entire new parts of herself and to dust out all the corners of her life and see what’s back there, what she tossed in the closet and why she was sometimes afraid to turn on the light to help her find a new direction. They will wonder, then, these two new friends, if Annie was not at the Minneapolis airport and if the man, David the professor, did not predict yet another cosmic happening because of all the lives that crossed for just those few hours when the clouds drifted into each other, the planes took a nap, and the world waited for the skies to clear.

But first Gretchen spies Jill, Balinda, Laura, Marie and Rebecca looking frantically for Katherine who, they are certain, must be reorganizing the management plan for the entire airport. Gretchen points toward the seat next to her, puts her finger to her lips, and silently invites the women to sit.

Jill wants to wake Katherine because Balinda thinks she has decided to take a bus back to Chicago. The wild winds from the west have changed everything.

Balinda has twenty-five minutes to make up her mind for certain, get a seat, and get out of the airport before everyone else tries to get on the same bus and get back home before the end of the decade, before George W. Bush ends a war or starts another one, or before women are finally allowed to do whatever in the hell they want with their own damn bodies.

The women funeral warriors watch Katherine sleep for a good five minutes before anyone is brave enough to wake her. They watch her because she not only looks beyond adorable curled up in the plastic seats with just a small trickle of saliva running down her lips but because every single one of them realizes they are going to miss her fine wit, penchant for organizing and for telling people what to do in a way that is sweet and usually very thoughtful, and her kind heart.

“Damn it,” Jill says and in the back of her mind, way far back as she is searching and grabbing for whatever it is she is looking for, Katherine hears her and shifts her mind toward the light.

When she opens her eyes it takes her a moment, blinking under the lights, to realize where she is and what she is supposed to be doing.

“Annie,” she says instinctively, searching for the box.

Gretchen puts her hand on Katherine’s leg, hands over the box, and says, “Here she is. You fell asleep.”

“Thank you,” Katherine says and impetuously leans over to plant a kiss on Gretchen’s cheek. “I must have drifted off.”

“Just a bit,” Gretchen tells her. “You were dreaming like crazy. Was someone chasing you?”

“I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m drunk. Do I know you?” Katherine asks, looking blankly into her eyes.

“Not yet, but sort of. I just tucked you in, stood guard over Annie, and came to the funeral you just conducted in the airport terminal. That should get me past the door.”

They all laugh and Balinda bounces forward and tells Katherine she thinks that she must leave. She said it looks bleak for anything happening in Seattle—this day, at least—and she’s worried about her mother.

“It’s time,” Balinda explains. “I can be there before midnight if I hop on the bus. I think my mom needs to see me even though she can barely talk when I call. I think she needs me and I feel charged up and ready to go back.”

“Of course she needs you,” Laura tells her. “You go. We’ll all walk you to the pick-up spot.”

Balinda wants to go and she wants to stay. She tells them this as they press through groups that have formed at various points throughout the airport. There is a herd of people in front of every bar and they watch as one group has formed a fascinating process for a drink to get from deep inside of the bar to someone on the outer edges—it’s a dancing line of humans who stop whatever they are doing when someone shouts the word “Another” and a drink on a serving tray goes one way and the money for it on another tray goes the opposite way. Some are playing cards, a few kids are kicking a soccer ball up and down the escalator steps, and there are dozens of small squabbles and loud phone conversations going on everywhere.

“Awesome,” Laura decides as they gather around Balinda by the bus stop. “It’s like some third-world country or something in just a matter of hours.”

The women, Annie’s pallbearers, stand under the long overhang at the side of the airport because rain is blasting into the building from every conceivable angle and they plant Balinda in the center, protecting her, covering her with their arms and hands in a group hug that brings her to tears.

“This has been wonderful for me,” she tells them. “Thank you for letting me barge in, for talking to me, for making me feel as if I was meant to do this from the beginning. Thank you for letting me believe that I was a real part of the whole traveling funeral.”

The women tell her to stop it. They assure her that Annie would have had it no other way and neither would any of them. They tell her to call and write and Laura promises to bring her luggage when and if she makes it back to Chicago.

“I feel ready to open up the boundaries of my own world,” Balinda confesses as she leans into Laura’s arms. “It hasn’t been just my mother. It’s been
me
. There’s also something I want to ask you, something that would mean a lot to me.”

“What?” the women all ask at the same time.

“When it’s time, when my mother dies, will you all help me with a traveling funeral? Will you start to save your money so we can go to Poland and spread her around and dance along the rivers, drink dark beer, and see what it was that made her love it so much?”

Right there, at that very moment, Jencitia Chalwaski’s fabulous traveling funeral is conceived and the women close their eyes and see flocks of foreign birds drifting toward the center of a large lake, they can smell sausages cooking at roadside cafés and hear whistling barmen swishing beer into glasses the size of mixing bowls. They all fly to Poland, just then, and hear the whispers of Jencitia’s own mama saying, “Welcome home, baby girl,” and they feel the fingers of the past wrapping themselves around their shoulders so that they know, they really know, the connection of a place—Jencitia’s place—that has driven itself into the center of the dying woman’s heart.

“Oh . . .” Balinda sighs. “This makes me so happy. I am going to tell my mother too. I’m going to tell her that we will take her home.”

Marie and Balinda spend a quiet moment together alone before Balinda gets on the bus. Marie presses her phone numbers into Balinda’s hand and they both say, almost at the exact same time, “You are not in this dying business alone.” And then Balinda whispers, “Thank you,” into Marie’s ear and Marie whispers, “No, thank you,” into Balinda’s ear.

Jill, Marie, Katherine, Laura and Rebecca huddle together, arms crossing shoulders, hand in hand. They stay outside until the bus pulls away and all they can see are the vanishing taillights that blink at the turn and then disappear into a stream of water that resembles a sheet of white glass. Balinda stares out the back window of the bus for hours. She watches the wet skyline fade into fields of corn, suburban subdivisions and roadside gas stations and she imagines the women waiting at the terminal and honoring, until the very end, the spirit of Annie G. Freeman.