Wake/Funeral

As I walk into the room where my father’s wake is being held, I’m terrified that I won’t cry. We spent so many years being angry with each other – what if I don’t feel anything but relief that he’s gone? But as soon as I take my mother in my arms, the tears come – real, honest, unforced. I relax into this moment: saying goodbye to my father for the last time.

“Come and see him,” my mother says. She takes me by the hand and leads me to my father’s casket. We talk to him, and about him, continuing to hold hands, crying, connected in a deep way, as we haven’t been for decades, all the estrangement temporarily gone.

Later I go back to the casket alone. I feel completely at ease with my father’s body. I’m able to stand close to him and think about him. I’m even able to put my hands on his hands, to make that physical contact with him, but also to feel the coldness, to really understand that he’s gone. It doesn’t feel morbid or creepy, but natural and right.

I’m not able to touch my father’s hair or kiss his face. That feels too intimate, somehow presumptuous, given the state of our relationship when he was alive. But touching his hands feels fine and I return to the casket several more times over the course of the wake just to be alone with him. I tell him I’m sorry for all of the ways we hurt each other and were not able to support each other.

Each time I cry in someone’s arms, I’m struck anew with this amazing realization – I’m not frozen, I’m not a monster, I did love him, I’m sad that he’s gone. I feel myself healing. It’s as if my brain has been split into two pieces – in one piece has lived the mostly “good dad” of my childhood and in the other, the mostly “bad dad” of my adulthood. Each time I cry, the separation between these two pieces gets smaller and they knit themselves back together a bit, until I realize my brain is no longer split and there is just one dad – a complicated person who is like all other people, a mixed up combination of positive and negative traits and behaviors.

The funeral, like the wake, is very small. The only people there are my immediate family members – my mother, my siblings and myself, our partners and some of our children. There are no friends or neighbors, no aunts or uncles or cousins. The service is led by a chaplain who never met my father, so at first, it’s impersonal and meaningless. For some reason, my mother has not asked any of us kids to speak, and she does not say anything herself. But she does have the chaplain play some recordings of my father playing the piano. The music makes all of us cry. For a few minutes, it seems as if my father is with us again – alive and unravaged by dementia.

My mother has chosen to have my father cremated, so there is no graveside service. After the funeral, I stand in the parking lot with my husband and my two older children, waiting for my youngest, so we can drive to my mother’s house for the meal. We’re about to send one of us back in to find her when she finally appears. 

“Where have you been?” we ask.

“I’ve been saying Kaddish for Grandpa,” she tells us. Even though this was a vaguely Christian funeral, it felt so strange to my Jewish daughter that no one said the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, that she felt compelled to say it herself. I’m overwhelmed with love for her, and for her father and siblings.

The five of us put our arms around each other and form a tight circle. I tell them how much I love them, how much it means to me that they’re all with me as I go through this moment. After losing so much when my mother got sick, I feel deeply grateful to once again have a family, intact and close, holding me up.