Nobody Likes Wakes.

If you live, you will one day die. I briefly mused yesterday about a wonderful metaphor for how fast it goes. When someone dies, there are various ways to pay respects. Friends and family gather to console each other, and to share memories of what made the deceased so special, so missed. At a wake, the coffin sits at the front of the room surrounded by flowers and cards, with a kneeler in front of it for people to say prayers and goodbyes. The immediate family sits in the front row of the room, to greet and be consoled by visitors. It's an awkward and difficult time, and I've often felt a hollowness, an inadequacy to the words “I'm so sorry.” I don't mean that the sentiment is hollow, because I AM sorry, but I feel like that means nothing and doesn't change anything for the person. I remember back in college when I heard a close friend had just lost his mother, I called him immediately, which was far too soon. It was the most awkward conversation I'd ever had. I said “I'm sorry” and in the newness of his grief he mumbled an “it's not YOUR fault”. Then there was some uncomfortable silence. Neither of us really knew the right thing to say. Over the years I've come to realize that the words DON'T matter, and sometimes the best thing you can do is just give someone a hug or sit beside them, give them company.

Inevitably, as we get older, we lose more and more people. Funerals become more common than birthdays and weddings. So far this year we've said goodbye to my mom's cousin, who died suddenly of what would later be revealed to be diabetes, and my dad's friend, the mechanic he went to when HE was stumped, a younger man who started his career working for my father and whose life also ended far too soon. My mom's cousin was only in her sixties, and my dad's friend was in his fifties. This past week my dad's sister called with the sad news that their cousin's 45-year-old son had been struck down by encephalitis.

Nobody likes wakes and, horrible though it may be, there have been times when my parents have asked me to go to one and I've looked for ways out of it. I've always gone for immediate family of course but if it's one of their friends' relatives, or someone they worked with, I'll usually say something along the lines of “Oh, I don't really know them.” Of course they'll say that the person knew me, and remind me of meeting the deceased or the deceased's family back when I was too young to remember. “So-and-so gave you a lollipop; don't you remember?” I'm bad at social situations all-around, and wakes were no exception. I had only met the man who died this week once, shaking his hand briefly at his father's wake three years ago. His mother, my dad's cousin's widow, I did know from a few other family gatherings. I wasn't sure when I got up this morning if I would go with my parents tonight, but the funeral home is in Jackson Heights, Queens, which looks beautiful in the photographs I've linked to but which is a very different place at night. The streets are a minefield of potholes and there's nowhere to park. My dad has trouble driving at night too. “Where are the lines? Why don't they paint these lines so you can see them? What are you talking about? I'm nowhere near that curb. Ahhh, let them beep, I was nowhere near them!” I didn't really want to go, but I didn't see how I could stay home with a clear conscience.

Neither of my dad's sister's sons, both older than I and one with a family of his own, were going, so she was going with my parents. She's a widow and lives alone. Another of my dad's sisters also has a grown son with a family who wasn't going, and at the last minute her husband said she should go with us because he doesn't like wakes. My dad was making plenty of noise about that to the first sister. “Oh that's terrible. Poor guy. What about us? Do we like going? No, but that's what you do.” My dad has two other sisters but one lives in a senior home and the other lives in Florida. So it was that I found myself driving my parents and two of my aunts into Queens on a Saturday night. My New York readers know what the L.I.E. traffic is like, especially on a Saturday night. It didn't help either to have shrill women in the back seat periodically making remarks like “Oh, you don't get NERVOUS driving like this? This isn't for me. I'd have a PANIC attack!” I also found myself embarrassed to be related to them as we got to the neighborhood and one commented how there were so many “foreign” people and why were so many kids out so late(7:30PM). I thought about fat little Italian girls playing on the street in front of their immigrant parent's house fifty or sixty years ago, but decided not to point out that she was calling the kettle black. As they later commented on the deceased being “soooo overweight” to his grieving mother, I again had to bite my tongue. At one point my dad leaned over and asked, “See, you think I'm bad?” and I agreed that he was the best of the five. He'll often say embarrassing things too loud in public like “do you have to go to the bathroom?”, but he's not as obnoxious or judgmental as his sisters, not by a longshot. He was worried about where we'd parked the car a few blocks over, and was whispering as much to me when we heard the sisters in the back loudly ask one another “WHAT DO YA THINK? IT'S AFTER NINE; WE BETTER GET OUT OF HERE.”

They said I was brave walking alone to get the car for them. I just needed to get a break from them. After we'd dropped them off at home, I heard an inspirational story. At one point the widow had been left alone. The deceased was quite overweight, but his wife was tall and thin and blonde, with a model's features. My mom went up and sat with her, and shared with us what they spoke about. She asked how they met, and she said she was on a date with someone else when he came over and gave her his card, telling her she was the woman he was looking for his whole life. Though she didn't really like the guy she was with, she was offended by the rudeness, approaching her when she was sitting with someone else. She crumpled up the card but didn't throw it away, and called him the next day to tell him how wrong it was for him to talk to her on her date. When she turned down an invitation to lunch he persisted by asking her to dinner and she relented. The restaurant he took her to was far from classy, but the company proved to be the best she'd ever had, and she was still with him sixteen years later.

We go to wakes to say goodbye, to honor the dead and comfort those who are left behind. But when someone dies, we look at how they lived and sometimes, just sometimes, we learn something about living ourselves.