Requiem

Requiem

A charlatan in white robes and a gold mantle stands before us in all his sober glory. The priest’s hangdog expression seemed better suited for the mortician who dressed up the dead than for the person who was about to commit my aunt into the Almighty’s embrace.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…

I first spotted him after saying my final goodbyes to Stephanie, redolent in her baby pink sweat suit and wooden coffin. My uncle had seen no need to dress her in her finest when she would soon be cremated. I can’t say that I blamed him. It did make a sort of morbid sense. The priest stood in the corner of the receiving room, a heavy bible clutched in his withered, arthritic hand. It was the second time I had been startled that day. The first being when I had walked into the reception room and seen Stephanie laid out in what the mortuary people euphemistically called ‘her final repose.’

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

Some would say that it was natural to dislike this man. Others would pooh-pooh and hush me for such blasphemous thoughts. I didn’t care. I felt rebellious anyway. I never cared for the overblown, browbeat-religion-into-your-skull approach, and part of me was angry, a large part. Anger toward the tobacco company and their insidious death campaign that addicted my aunt to the nicotine that killed her, anger toward the doctors and all their knowledge failing my aunt, and yes, anger at God, or whatever.

For yea tho’ I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil…

The funeral mass was wrong. It held no solace or comfort, and certainly didn’t remind me of the woman with the infectious giggle that spread into your soul. The priest’s words were hollow to my ears. This man didn’t know my aunt. He was just going through the motions, and badly at that. His speech slurred and stuttered which made me wonder if he was drunk or suffering from the first pangs of Alzheimer’s.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…

I wanted to march up to the altar and poke him to see if he was human. Could he not see the flood of mourners before him? Could he not hear the heart-rending sobs of my younger cousin, bent into the crook of my aunt Sharon’s shoulder? Was he immune to the tsunami of human emotion filling the chapel? He had to be. As far as I was concerned he was an imposter, a leech, a parasite feeding off the dark aura of our grief.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies…

Alongside my burning hatred for this swindler of comfort was a simmering astonishment that he could dare send my aunt off with such restricted language and ceremony. While he recited the Gospel in salvia-dripping tones, all I could think of was my aunt giggling with my mother as they followed two transvestites into Sex World in Minneapolis. Yes, Sex World, to my ever-lasting mortification and embarrassment, but that was Stephanie. It may have been a somewhat misguided attempt at cheering me up after a bad break-up, but that was my family. After a couple of mimosas and glasses of wine, the veil covering our inhibitions falls, which was yet another indication that the priest standing before us had no place with us. I had serious doubts that this man knew what it was to drops his inhibitions if they fell out of the sky, landed on his face and started to dance a jig on his snowboard forehead.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the logic of this man being in charge of sending my aunt’s soul off into the great beyond. He was incompetent and inconsiderate, a fact that was driven home when suddenly, in the middle of the Eucharist, he excused himself because someone had forgotten the blood of Christ, the frickin’ Communion wine. Shocked disbelief reverberated throughout the chapel as he toddled down the aisle to retrieve the forgotten wine. It was not to be borne. I can’t say what would have happened if it weren’t for my aged grandparents in the pew behind me and the clawed death grip of my aunt Sharon restraining me, but it would have been bloody and brutal.

And somewhere in all of this, I know that Stephanie is giggling.