I’ve been saving up topics and memories for essay starts for a couple of days now. I started collecting them on a scrap of paper smaller than a playing card. It became my bookmark, and soon enough it had tiny words squeezed onto every available white space, front and back.
Memories from random pockets of my sub-conscious floated to the surface. I’m surprised by these long forgotten snippets of a time I thought I’d never forget – but actually wanted to. Like, that Rob’s Uncle Louie spoke at the funeral and cried at the podium and talked about taking Rob to McDonald’s every week and watching him eat French fries with his ketchup; and that the priest that said the funeral mass was also the priest that married us six months earlier. (We got married in 1997 in Colorado where we were stationed, but had the Catholic ceremony in 2000 in Massachusetts so his family could be present.)
Or the limosine ride to the gravesite after the funeral.
I sat in the back seat with two people on either side of me. I don’t even remember who now. It must have been Gerry and Lena.
The leather was a luscious creamy color that reminded me of homemade organic vanilla ice cream. I stared at the back of the front seat thinking, This would be where the driver’s picture would be, if this were a cab.
My view through the windshield was the hearse in front of us. The back door hadn’t been closed yet and the cherry wood of the casket blared out, There’s a body in here. Rob’s body. I knew it wasn’t him in there. He’d gone somewhere else, but the rest of him – the part he wasn’t using anymore – was in there.
My uncle from North Carolina (the only family member from my side that was able to attend) slid in the front seat next to the chauffeur. His navy suit collar met the skin below his graying red hair. His shoulders suggested that his hands lay in his lap without clenching and his head was bowed. And then he cried.
He gasped and sobbed and his shoulders moved up and down and I cringed. He was crying and I was not. He didn’t even know the people in the limo and his vulnerability leaked out along with his tears. He didn’t even know Rob, save the one time Aubrey, Rob and I visited him. I was embarrassed for him.
But later I remember that I once went to a memorial service for a long time friend of Rob’s. I cried there. I didn’t know anybody there and I’d never met Beth. But I knew the people that loved her. I knew Rob and Chris and Susie and Stacey. And I knew that they were in pain and that hurt me, so I cried. My uncle was doing the same. He didn’t know anybody there except me, and he loved me and I was hurting, and so he cried.
At the military funeral that we had for Rob, the soldiers in Class A’s stood at attention and Taps was played not by a bugler at the site, but on a black boombox placed conspicuously and irreverently on a nearby headstone. Tacky, but moving nonetheless. That was the part of the service I cried at.
At the end two soldiers in white gloves folded the flag with precision movements. One of them walked it up to me and placed the flag in my upturned hands. He saluted me. Through my tears I was stymied. Being an army veteran myself, I knew that soldiers didn’t salute other soldiers out of uniform. And civilians didn’t salute at all.
In fact, it was kind-of a joke to the soldiers I buddied with at my MOS training. Whenever we saw civilians saluting to each other, on movies or something, we’d roll our eyes and shake our heads.
So I’m out of uniform, not a soldier anymore anyway, and I’m being saluted to. What do I do? I salute back. It seemed the expected thing to do and it felt right. I always liked saluting -- showing someone respect and that you honored them – like taking your hat off when you entered a building. It just felt right.
And then after the services, the gathering at our house. The only piece I remember of that time was walking around the house and coming up past the open garage door. It was packed full of people with red-rimmed eyes telling stories and smoking. I made eye contact with Danny Almeda, a neighbor friend of ours – one who’d grown up with Rob and played in the forest and rode bikes together – and Joe Filipe, Rob’s cousin that owned a night club. I so wanted to be in there and to light up a Marlboro Red from a hard pack, but I’d quit smoking Thursday. The day Rob died. I was pregnant now. So I walked on past, lifting my chin at them. They nodded in response, and one raised his cigarette, like his own version of a salute.
You’d think I’d remember huge chunks of this surreal day in my life, but no. Only these. Sometimes I wish I remembered more, wished that I’d written it down at the end of each day to preserve it forever. I never thought I’d have to. Who would’ve thought I’d forget something so horrific? But other times I remind myself that I know enough.
I remember as much as I am supposed to.
