A Decade
I definitely don’t have aphantasia. Whenever I read or hear a story, I’m almost certainly picturing it in my head, laying it over the places and scenes from my life. They’re not photo realistic, but I certainly could at least draw out the rough layout of many of the important places in my life.
So if something takes place in a school, I’ll probably either picture my 3rd or 5th grade elementary school classrooms- how the desks are arranged in clusters, where the teacher stands in front of the blackboard, the combination of fluorescent light from the ceiling and natural light from the skinny window in the corner.
For almost any house it’ll be some mixture of the first apartment I remember, and the house I grew up in, depending on what the descriptions call for. Start with the living room leading to the kitchen and the backyard, maybe move the stairs to a different side and bring a bedroom downstairs. The couches are always green and match the walls though.
For funerals and wakes, I’ll probably be thinking about the Chinese funeral home in Brooklyn I visited 10 years ago. There’s a coffin in the front, a fireplace to the left, and though I can’t really remember if anyone spoke that day, the stories I read usually do have someone saying a few nice words, so there’s a podium to the right. I’ll probably see the whole thing from just right of center, a few rows back, where I sat that day as I folded paper money to throw into the fire.
I can still remember the two-story white paper house burning, cackling, askew in the fireplace, hoping to give her peace in the next life.
I don’t remember her being religious, but I’m pretty sure the service was Buddhist, because I guess that was the closest thing that had the right customs, and you must have to pick something when you suddenly find yourself planning a funeral.
I remember walking past her with a friend, twice, and thinking that it didn’t look like her lying there. Her face was swollen, she didn’t have her glasses, it didn’t look like her lying there.
I remember the long trip to New Jersey, that year and several times in the years after, because I guess you must have to pick wherever there’s space when you suddenly find yourself planning a funeral.
It’s always sunny when we go, because we know we’ll be outside for a while. We get off the train and start walking, passing by a convenience store to pick up drinks and snacks for the afternoon. When we get to the graveyard, we find the cottage-like main building and walk past it, to the left of a grove of trees (lush and green, because it’s summer), looking for the black stone with engraved roses tucked away in a corner. Sometimes there are already offerings there, sometimes we wipe off the dust and dirt from the top of the stone. We settle in a semi-circle, not talking about anything in particular, but we brought flowers and snacks, so we’ll just sit and reconnect for a bit. We always leave something before we go- a small sketch one year, a tassel from a graduation she never got to attend one the next, an electronics breadboard some other time (the one time it started raining- a tall and lanky form crouched on the grass connecting wires while the rest of us stood with umbrellas around him). On our way back, we’ll stop by that one Chinese restaurant next to the convenience store and order a Happy Family, whatever that is. We eat ice cream on the roof of the parking structure while we wait for the next train home. We hope that we can make it back the next year, but as time passes other things get in the way- internships, graduation trips, work, moving to the other side of the country. Is tradition defined by the series of actions you go through each time? Or is it the meaning behind them?
A decade is a long time. At every milestone, I wonder where she would be. What college would she go to? What would her college graduation look like? Would she go on to grad school? Med school? It takes a few years but before you know it, it’s not just the gap of “she should have been here” at prom, at high school graduation. It’s looking back and seeing her frozen in place while everyone else has gone on and grown up. Growing up is overrated, but what a gift it is as well.
