In Loving Remembrance

Seven years ago, I was at her wedding. Now I'm at her funeral, and nothing makes sense.

It's almost the same thing, really. All of my family is gathered around white circular tables, and there's a long buffet of food. Only this time, there's a weight in the air, a heavy, overwhelming sadness. Everyone is crying and hugging each other, and the food has gotten cold.

I sit in silence, and somehow, part of me expects her to walk through the door at any minute, smiling and waving hello.

If I had to make a list of everyone I knew in order from most likely to commit suicide to least likely, she’d be in the bottom ten if not last. She was always smiling, always happy, always the one cheering everyone else up.

Anna’s husband, Bill, walks around the room shaking hands and thanking them for coming. He wears a smile, but I have never seen such dark lines under his eyes. He looks so, so tired. Across the room, his two young sons play with the other children. They don’t understand what’s happening. They don’t understand that they’ll never see their mother again.

Anna was anorexic. She had such hidden turmoil over her body image. Only a few people knew, and I mostly blame the doctor. He told her that she had a hormone dysfunction that would cause her to gain weight. Her father is overweight. In her diary, she wrote that she would never be fat. She would kill herself after the holidays.

Anna’s mother comes over to our table. My parents and I stand up and go to her. She wears sunglasses although we are inside. She lets the tears stream down her face without bothering to wipe them away.

“I knew in October that God was preparing me for some great tragedy,” she whispers. “But I never imagined…”

I hug her as she sobs.

When Anna was sixteen, she and her mother came to visit my family. We went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, but I threw a fit. I didn’t want to eat meat, although by now I was used to people telling me to just eat it and stop complaining. Anna smiled at me and said, “It’s all right. I don’t like meat either. We’ll get vegetable lo mein and eat it together.” She was the first person to acknowledge me as a vegetarian.

“She always was so accepting,” her mother remembers, still crying. “She didn’t judge anyone, and she didn’t take any crap from anyone. When she was an assistant football coach at the high school, she’d put those boys in headlocks if they disrespected her. She’d talk to strangers in the elevator, and they’d tell her their problems, just open up right away.”

My mom asks how she’s doing. It has only been five days since Anna’s death, after all.

“I’m fine now. I’m in crisis mode, but after the funeral, I’ll just break down,” Anna’s mother replies. “I’ll just shut down completely, but I’m so thankful my mother is here to help me through this.”

Anna’s grandmother, my great grandaunt, is ninety-one years old. When they told her the news, they had doctors waiting outside. It’s a miracle she didn’t collapse and die, they say. She has buried two husbands and most of her relatives. Now she will bury her first grandchild.

“Who knows what was going through her mind?” Anna’s mother asks. We are all crying by now. “She would never be perfect enough. All of our love couldn’t save her if she didn’t love herself. But I had a vision. She was sitting on God’s lap, and she was finally happy. She has His all-perfect love.”

We mingle throughout the room, our conversations leaping back and forth from the weather to whether or not the boys found her body. Bill found her body. He left to pick the boys up from somewhere, and when they got home, she was dead. He managed to keep the boys from seeing her corpse. It was the day before her twenty-seventh birthday.

I wonder what they’ll do with the presents and decorations. It feels as though a knife has gone through my heart.

The pastor leads Anna’s closest family members to the sanctuary. He come back a few minutes later and leads the rest of her family to another room. He tells us to wait there, and he will return to take us to the sanctuary in a few minutes.

Five years ago, Bill broke his leg in non-contact hockey. At the annual family reunion, my dad, Bill, Anna, and I played mini-golf together. Bill beat everyone even though he was on crutches. Anna was so angry, playfully hitting him or taking his crutches.

The next year, Anna and Bill had a little boy. The year after that, they had another. Both children had strawberry blond hair. Anna and Bill had brown hair. When we wondered how they had gotten their hair color, Bill teasingly said, “Our mailman has red hair.”

This year, I didn’t go to the family reunion. I’ll go next year, I thought. I’ll see everyone again. No need to go every single year.

I wish desperately that I had gone.

The pastor returns and leads us in one line to the sanctuary. It is filled with hundreds of people. They stand up respectfully as the pastor leads us to the first few rows. The stage is covered in baskets and baskets of flowers. Her pinkish-brown coffin has a metal gleam and is topped with white and pink roses. The lid is closed. It’s much easier that way.

The pastor stands on the stage and tells us that this is a celebration of Anna’s life. She was a devout Christian. She went on many mission trips and handed out flyers at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. She loved children and always helped with the preschool. When she was six or seven, she wrote a letter to President Bush and told him that she was glad to be free because she could go anywhere she wanted, including the world’s biggest McDonald’s.

"No one can know what someone else is feeling," he says. "I don't know how you are feeling, and you don't know how I am feeling. Only God understands, and only He can comprehend how terrible Anna's pain was."

Her friend comes up and sings a few songs, and when the pastor returns, he touches a very delicate topic.

“Suicide is not an unforgivable sin,” he says. “The only unforgivable sin is disbelief in Jesus as our Savior, and Anna had great belief. She is with God in heaven, and we shall all see her again some day.”

A slideshow is projected onto two large screens at the front of the sanctuary. I am not only crying but heaving silently now. She looks so happy in all of these pictures. I can’t believe that I’ll never see her again. I’ll never hear her voice again or see her smile or even just sit in her living room talking to her.

The slideshow ends, and the pallbearers solemnly pick up her coffin. We rise and watch it pass. Can that really be the body of my dear, beloved cousin inside? Reality seems distant. It is too harsh, too terrible to accept.

The family files out next. I am aware of the stares of her many friends and coworkers. I don’t care that I have tears running down my face or that my nose and eyes are red or that my make-up is undoubtedly ruined. I just look at the ground and wish she could have been here to see how many people loved her. Only one person died, but hundreds were wounded.

I have the feeling that this is not like most funerals. This is too tragic, too scarring. No one can say that it was “her time to go” or that she had “lived a long, full life.” There isn’t even anyone to truly blame, although there’s plenty of silent finger-pointing. Why didn’t you see it? Why did you leave her alone? Why didn’t you send her to a shrink after that doctor’s appointment? Why didn’t you read her diary?

A part of me blames her. Why did you have to kill yourself? Why couldn’t you see how beautiful you were? Why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you leave behind your husband and sons? Why couldn’t you see how much you were loved? Why? Why? Why?

Bill is standing in the lobby, shaking hands and trying to be strong. It was the same way after their wedding, only she was standing beside him in a white gown with a bell-like skirt, smiling and hugging the guests. Her coffin is out here now, but the hearse waits right outside the doors. I want to go up to Bill and tell him that I am sorry. I want to tell him that it isn’t his fault, that he prolonged her life if anything. I want to tell him how much I admired Anna, how I looked up to her, how I idealized her. She was absolutely amazing and wonderful in my mind, and I wanted to be like her.

But I don’t. I throw away my tissues and go to the car. It’s bitterly cold, and the skies are gray. We decide to not go to the cemetery. It will be crowded, and we have a long drive home.

I stare out the window for all four hours of it. I try to keep myself from crying again.

"Do you think she'll go to heaven?" my mom asks.

"There's no way to know for sure," my dad replies, and he means he doesn't think so. I am silent but furious. I don't want her to go to hell. She was a wonderful person and a strong Christian. She doesn't deserve it. It isn't right.

I deeply regret missing the last family reunion. Maybe I would have seen something. Maybe she would have said something. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and now she is gone forever.

The last image of her I have in my mind is from two years ago. Her oldest son picked up a piece of glass at the park and brought it to her.

“Put that in the trash can,” she commanded sternly. “You have ten fingers; I bet you’d like to keep all of them.” She turned to me and smiled, laughing slightly.

Perhaps it’s better that this is how I remember her.