At the back of my mind...

My tremulous shoulders reveal an emotional outburst, but I hide my swollen face in a mascara stained paper towel clutched in my trembling hands. All around me I can feel my well-behaved relatives shooting glances in my direction, feeling sorry for me, but wishing I could get my act together and behave like the civilised human being I was brought up to be. Dressed appropriately in black, they feel they have a right to judge me, the rebel in jeans and t-shirt.
       Take a bow, Sheila. You’ve earned your applause. Now drop the act.
       No, not today. There’s no acting today. A bit of hiding, but no acting.
       The valium I took earlier makes me feel detached, almost like I’m floating underneath the ceiling. But I’m still connected with my feelings. And with my memories. I’m bringing all of that up there with me, staring down upon the rest of the people, quietly absorbed with their hushed grief. Which is how I can tell that even the people behind me are staring at me, and wondering.
       “Sheila’s upset,” they whisper. “Look, her shoulders are shaking, she’s crying so hard. I didn’t know they were that close.”
       Well, there were a lot of things they don’t know.
       Like the fact that his eyes are staring at me through his closed eye lids from the closed casket. And that I can see his hands, scrubbed clean, folded upon his chest as in prayer. They’ve washed his hands of this world for him, and made him ready to enter the next one. I close my own eyes, and see an image of his heavy body in the cold, damp earth, so real I can almost smell it.
       His hair and fingernails still growing.
       Worms feasting on his rotting flesh.
       My head aches, and as I rub my temples I feel a nausea coming on. And I remember things so vividly that I can hear and feel them. His voice, telling me to lie still or else. His hands, always clammy against my skin, ever since I was too young to understand what he was doing. I can’t focus on what the minister says. His compassionate voice seeps through only in bits and pieces: “…a real tragedy… at such a young age…”
       What does he know? I finger-brush my hair away from my face with both hands, and look up finally. Teary eyed, putting a hand in front of my mouth to stop the craziest of sounds coming through it, I let the world see me for what I am.
It’s my cousin’s funeral, and I can’t stop laughing.
       “This is life,” my uncle says, standing in front of the casket. He turns around and looks at the wooden walls concealing his son from him. He swallows heavily, and when he continues, his voice breaks appropriately. “Loving and losing. That’s what it’s all about.”
       And I just can’t stop laughing.