Distant Cousin

I’m leaning against the outside wall of a funeral home smoking a cigarette. My body is still vibrating from the five-hundred-mile trek in my car to get here. I finish my cigarette and put it out, but instead of going inside I light another one.

I’m scared.

I’m here because my cousin Kyler walked down the normally busy Route 25-A in the wee hours of the morning on the wrong side of the road. There are no sidewalks. He was hit by a car that was going at least the speed limit and very possibly more. It was a Saturday. It was sixteen days before his high school graduation.

The driver was drowsy or asleep, but he got a good lawyer, so no one ever found out which.

I like to think Kyler didn’t feel anything, but he was still alive after he was hit; alive enough to be life-flighted to Long Island Jewish from the field of the high school where he had commenced his walk home. Even though the doctors said he was brain-dead, nobody can know whether there were some neurons firing in there, invisible to the EEG, but enough to constitute the person he was, enough to stare into the abyss that lies past death’s vestibule.

Therein lies the horror of death: knowing for certain that it’s coming, and coming soon.

My first stop was my grandparents’ house. My grandfather died some years before, but my grandmother is still chugging along despite the beginning of senile dementia. I’d hoped somebody would be there to tell me where I was supposed to be. I knew that the viewing was being held, but I didn’t know where so the house was as good a place as any to start.

No one came to the door despite the cars in the driveway. I turned to go.

“You came,” my cousin John said after pulling the door open, much surprised after he opened the door. I turned around. He looked disheveled like he had just woken up.

“I came,” I repeated. “Is that such a miracle?”

I let a few beats go by. He said nothing.

“Where’s the viewing?” I asked him. He told me along with directions on how to get there even though I knew where it was.

“Why aren’t you there?” I asked.

“I was there,” John said.

I figured that he was really grieving, and some people deal with it privately instead of publicly. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to go to the viewing either, but I figured I had to as a show of solidarity.

The parking lot is full. The streets around the parking lot are solidly lined with carsf. I have to park at a strip mall across the street and walk to the funeral home from there.

As I smoke, a group of high school kids, mainly girls, squirt out of the front door like a blob of jelly from a squeeze bottle. They are hysterical with grief, heaving great hitching sobs and leaning all over each other for support.

I want to leave, but I’ve come all this way. I just have to brace myself. Just one more cigarette. My hand shakes as I light it. I can feel the concentrated mourning crackling through the air like static energy.

I’m halfway through my cigarette when two women approximately my age come out, light cigarettes, and stand on the other side of the door from me. For the first time since I got here, I don’t feel so alone. I never do when there’s a community of smokers to be a part of.

“Who are you?” one of the women asks me.

“I’m a cousin on my mother’s side,” I said. “I’m Gabriel. Gabe.”

“I’m a cousin on his father’s side,” she says. “I’m Lisa, and this is my partner Erica.”

She studies my face for a reaction, but I don’t care. We shake hands all around. I have been found worthy – or not unworthy.

Another pack of high school kids passes between us through the doorway from the parking lot. It looks like a different pack from the first one I’d seen. Lisa and Erica are momentarily blocked from view.

“Were you close?” Lisa asks when the parade ends.

“No, not particularly,” I answer. “How about you?”

“We didn’t see him all that much,” she said. “We live in Connecticut.”

“I live in Ohio.”

I finish my cigarette and light another one. This is my fourth since I got here.

“What’s with all these kids?” I ask.

“They’re from his school,” Lisa says, shaking her head. “Haven’t you been in there yet?”

“No. I’m trying to work up the nerve.”

She nods. “It’s kind of intense.”

“Great.”

I stub out my cigarette, bid my fellow smokers goodbye, and go inside.

I don’t have to ask which room Kyler is in. There’s a lot of noise emanating from it, boisterous with raw emotion. My Aunt Jo and Uncle Rick, Kyler’s parents, are sitting in the corner of the room with my grandmother, my mother, and my other aunts. Aunt Jo is present but not accounted for. Her world is one of unmitigated grief that she will never leave. My uncle seems more present. He’s wearing a large wooden cross around his neck that looks like it came from the wall above someone’s bed. He’s sending a message, or maybe hoping to receive one. I have no idea what the message might be one way or the other.

I take a seat near the back of the room. No one pays attention to me.

The pack of high school kids who had squeezed through the front door moments before is surrounding the open casket. They are holding hands in a semicircle around Kyler. They may be praying; they may be holding hands in solidarity. Some of them begin sobbing. The group moves toward the exit. For the moment, Kyler’s corpse is alone.

I take the opportunity to go to the casket and pay my respects. I don’t want to be surrounded by the cheerleading squad when I do it. As the pack moves out, I move up.

Kyler doesn’t look at all like Kyler. I suppose the morticians had done their best to put him back together, but the body lying before me isn’t him. He’s gone. These are the remains of some other person.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I say. I bow my head so it will look like I’m praying. I don’t pray. There is no one I can pray to in good conscience.

Another gang of high schoolers comes in and crowds me away from the casket. They don’t bother to excuse themselves, and they don’t care who I might be. They’re grief junkies coming to get their fix, and no one is going to stand in their way. I push my way through them and return to my seat in the rear of the room. As I watch them, they begin crying. Then they leave the room en masse. I know they’ll be back in a few minutes for another hit.

I see my cousin John sitting on the other side of the room with our un-blood-related cousin Margaret, who comes from our affine uncle’s first marriage. I wonder why he came back. I’m suddenly struck by the body language of the pair, the way they’re facing each other. They’ve been screwing. It’s one way to deal with grief.

I’m supposed to be thinking about Kyler. I dredge up a few memories. I don’t have many. The last time I saw him was a few years before. He was showing me his hotrod. It looked like part of a plane fuselage with wheels, and I told him so. He was perpetually tinkering with the thing, but he never drove it further than the corner and back. He never would.

Now I am in the proper frame of mind.

Kyler will never do anything he planned to do. He’ll never experience life beyond high school. He’ll never know how much better it can get. He’ll never know that.

I tear up. I let a single tear stream down my cheek as evidence of my grief before I wipe it away. Someone must have seen it.

There. I’ve done it. I can leave now.