Leonard Cohen had a dirty, under-his-guts voice.
I wanted to punch him in the throat to make him stop singing sometimes. All of his little jokes about being 'a singer with a golden voice' could go, but right now, I couldn't live without him.
I woke up on a Tuesday morning.
Maybe it was Tuesday.
I didn't care enough to flip open a calendar and see how many squares I'd lived through since I last checked. My arm was draped over my stereo, my prized possession. It was a cheap three disc changer that only changed discs two and three. Leonard was spinning on repeat in tray two.
Song six.
I Can't Forget.
My face was glued to the pillowcase by a mixture of tears, snot, and slobber. I peeled the pillow away from my face and got out of bed. My brother Connor and I had rooms at the end of the hallway directly facing each other. He'd just painted his room dark blue, and I thought it was really cool.
My room was a sick white.
The kind of white that made white people want to be called pink people.
I cracked Connor's door open and poked my head in. Somewhere underneath the knot of duvet and flannelette was my brother. This was the third time this week I'd found him like this, curled up in a little ball with the pillow over his head. I asked him about it, and he told me I was too loud when I was crying at night. He wasn't upset or mad at me about it. He just wanted to sleep.
I hadn't always cried myself to sleep. Before this week, I couldn't remember the last time I had cried at all.
I hated crying.
It hurt my face and was a real mess.
But I couldn't stop crying now. Every damn night I bellyached and wailed until my eyes were empty and I'd lost my voice.
My dad was dead.
"The funeral's at noon, Will," Mum said from somewhere upstairs.
Her voice was shaky.
If anyone had been crying more than me, it was her. Her eyes were always red. Bright, bloody and terrible red. The red that I used for making fire in my drawings as a kid. I went upstairs. I could hear Mum crying in her bathroom. She and Dad had an en-suite, which is fancy for 'private bathroom' or pretty obvious for 'stay out, kids.' It smelled of Old Spice and some weird powder my mum used. There used to always be steam in there, because my dad took really hot baths instead of showers.
Baths were disgusting.
I stopped taking baths when I turned 12, because I couldn't handle the idea of rolling around in a steadily more lukewarm soup of my own nasty juices. That was probably why Dad used so much Old Spice.
I didn't want to, God knew I didn't want to, but I knew that I had to go see how Mum was doing. Going back downstairs and playing Halo until my eyes exploded sounded way better, but she needed me more than the Master Chief did.
Her door was locked.
I jiggled the handle a couple of times, and heard muffled crying coming from somewhere inside the bathroom. It wasn't a very big room, so she was either sitting inside the tub like an insane person, or huddled on the toilet.
I knocked on the door.
"Don't come in here," she blubbed.
"I can't, Mum. You've locked the door."
The lock snicked open. I opened the door and saw her sitting on the toilet, the lid still down.
I said a quick thank you to whoever was watching out for me that I didn't have to see my mum crying and taking a dump at the same time.
"You okay?"
She shook her head. She was in really rough shape. I leaned down and wrapped my arms around her. She cried and cried, and I held her for a long time.
She was so sad.
I said a short prayer to whatever god was listening that I never had to go through something like losing my chosen one. Losing a dad or a cousin is one thing. I never chose them. They happened to me. Mum and Dad's relationship was different.
They met each other.
They fell in love.
They got married, and had a bunch of babies.
They chose each other.
Out of the billions of people on this Earth, they chose to spend their lives with each other.
No one should ever have to go through that.
That's why I didn't want to let her go.
*
I didn't know what to wear.
Everyone said to wear something black, but the only black things I had were a Bob Marley t-shirt that said 'There's a natural mystic blowing through the air' and a black hoodie with a gigantic hole in the left armpit.
My dad had asked me whether or not I smoked pot after I bought the Marley shirt, and I told him only a couple of times, which was true. I just liked Bob Marley. Last year I even sent away for a package from the University of the West Indies because I thought Rastafarianism was cool. I had to wear black, though, so on went Bob.
I'd never been to a funeral before.
I wished I could have gone to one before that wasn't my dad's.
My little sister Madeline looked really cute in her black dress with white frilly cuffs. They were all my little sisters, but she was the littlest one.
She was only six.
I was six ten years ago. I barely remembered it. Six was the year that I tackled a girl into a pile of sand because she was going to touch me, and her mum grabbed me by the arm and told me I was a ruffian that was going to die young.
I think that girl kissed me later that day.
Or double-bounced me on the teeter-totter.
There were lots of people at the church. I didn't know half of them. Later on my mum told me that a lot of them were friends from when Dad was younger.
I wondered how many funerals he'd gone to before he was dead.
How many friends had he dressed up for?
Everyone was hugging Mum and my sisters.
"We're so sorry," said everyone.
Each person had a different 'we're so sorry' but they all said the same words. Some people said it as if they were angry at my dad, others said it as though Mum was about to die too. She did a lot of nodding and thank-you-ing.
No one was hugging me.
My brother was hovering around, and every so often an auntie or a weird middle-aged lady with goopy black makeup would give him a big squeeze and say 'it's always the little ones.'
Still, no one hugged me.
The priest made us all take our seats, but there were so many people there that it took ten minutes for everyone to finally sit down. He opened his little red bible, and reached into his front pocket for something. I thought it was odd that he had a pocket in the front of his priest robes, and then I wondered if he was wearing underwear. I didn't want to go to hell, so I stopped thinking about the priest's undergarments. He pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and pinched them onto his nose.
"We will now sing hymn 476," he wheezed.
His voice sounded like spiderwebs. Everyone opened their hymn books and started singing. Hymns are stupid. No one ever knows the melody, and the organ that they use is way out of tune, so everyone just makes it up. This one sounded particularly terrible, and I was positive God would get angry if we did another one.
The priest didn't make us sing again, and started talking. He went on and on and on and on and on about God and how God is good, and that we are all His flock and all that stuff about sheep from the Bible.
I never read that book.
It wasn't that I hated the idea of God or religion or spirituality or anything like that; I just hated the thin oniony paper they used to print the Bible. I always worried it would rip if I so much as breathed too hard. I always thought its other title of 'The Good Book' was a bit much, too.
What if it wasn't a very good book?
I bet some critics didn't like it.
Did they have critics back in Jesus's day?
The priest blessed my dad, and us, and said comforting words to my mother about how God had called Dad home, and I thought yeah right because the next time Dad was coming home he was going to be a pile of ashes.
I didn't think that heaven was home.
Home was where the people that need you to be there can count on you to be there.
No one needed Dad in heaven.
It all finished with the Lord's Prayer, which was another silly name in religion that made me confused. Weren't they all the Lord's Prayer? Didn't you say 'amen' after all of them? Why was that one specifically THE Lord's Prayer?
It wasn't even a very good one. It was pretty demanding at some points even: give us this day our daily bread, for example. He was God. He was pretty busy. I wasn't going to sit around waiting for him to get me some bread.
People nodded, feeling God touch them way down inside, I guessed. The priest said his last amen, and looked at my mother.
"Shall we open the casket now for the viewing?" he asked.
My mother nodded, and the priest hoisted open the lid of the coffin with a good deal of effort. I stood up from the pew and slowly, slowly inched my way up to the open casket. It felt like the carpet underneath my feet was moving backwards as I was walking forwards.
I knew he was in there.
I didn't want to look; I even knew that if I looked that would be how I remembered my dad for the rest of my life, but I had to look.
I got really, really close to the casket. I was close enough to reach out and touch it, but not close enough to see inside yet. I shuffled my feet closer to the casket and shut my eyes. I was standing above him, and I could smell the deadness flowing up from him. It smelled sweet, like an old tin of candies that I would be scared of trying. I reached out with my hand and brushed something cold.
It was so cold I jumped.
I opened my eyes.
It was him.
My dad.
Dead.
Looking like he was just having another one of his sleep-it-off Sunday naps. Mum had dressed him in his faded cream-coloured sweater with the diamonds on it. I think I'd seen him wear that sweater three out of the seven days of last week. It brought out his eyes, my mum always said. His eyes were closed, and they'd put just a bit too much eyeliner on him. He looked like an Egyptian, which I thought was a weird thought to have, because I'd never actually met an Egyptian person. I'd watched mummy movies and read books on the pharaohs and the unification of the northern and southern kingdoms, but I'd never met a real live Egyptian. Maybe they didn't wear so much eyeliner anymore.
His chest wasn't rising.
Or falling.
It wasn't doing anything.
I'd always loved his barrel chest. It made me think my dad could take care of anything. Now it just lay there, his hands folded unnaturally across it like he was waiting for the bus and he'd forgotten something to read. Mum had taken off his wedding ring and put it on her own finger. It was way too big for her, and she had to keep checking to make sure it was on. He looked naked without it. I put my hand on his chest. Part of me, no matter how childish or ridiculous it seemed, had dreamed this whole time that it was all him just having a deep nap. Seeing my hand vibrant and alive against the stillness of death, I knew he was gone. They finally closed the casket lid, and it slammed down and nearly took off my fingers.
"Will the pallbearers please take their places?" asked the priest.
I was one of the pallbearers. I didn't know what a pall was, and I never had a chance to look it up before the funeral. Maybe it was the coffin, or the body inside. My grandpa, my uncle, and my dad's three best friends from high school all joined me around the coffin and grabbed one of the golden handles along the sides. I stood at the back left corner and held the handle. We lifted up the coffin and walked it out to the hearse. Everyone looked at me. My heart was beating, smashing, I wanted to rip it out of my chest. Their eyes were all so, so sad. I hated their eyes. I didn't want them to look at me. My face was hot, and I started crying.
I couldn't help it.
Tears poured down my face like I had cut open my ducts and let them drain. Silent, angry crying that I was sharing with the entire funeral. They kept staring. I wanted them to turn away. We finally got to the hearse and loaded my dad into the back. He was heavy. I never thought he was fat or anything, but he was frigging heavy. The door of the hearse closed, and the car pulled away with my dead dad in the trunk. I watched it go, sobbing my eyes out as the cold wind sliced my cheeks. They were all still behind me, firing judgment at my spine. A hand rested softly on my shoulder.
I looked at it.
It was a man's hand.
The hand belonged to my dad's very best friend in the whole world.
"I'm so sorry, Will," he said.
His name was Barry. I'd always wondered if Barry was a nickname for Benry like Harry is for Henry, but my mum always told me to go find something to do whenever I started asking questions like that.
I guessed no one was named Benry anyways.
"You're the man now," Barry said.
I looked up at him.
"What?" I asked.
"You've got to watch out for everyone now," he explained. "Your mum's going to need you to be a man now."
He looked down at me with his middle-aged man eyes and nodded seriously. Maybe it was even a grave nod. My mum loved this one series of books about a hospital, and everyone was always nodding gravely about the patients. Then they would all have sex in various parts of the hospital. It was funny reading all the different words that romance writers used to avoid saying penis.
"Did you hear me, Will?" Barry asked.
I had heard him.
I just hadn't answered him yet.
I couldn't get past one particular word he'd said. It was running around in my head, doing laps and bouncing off the walls. I'd had a terrible nightmare years and years ago, about mummies chasing me and trying to embalm me and make me a mummy too, and I ran upstairs to find my parents. Dad told me to pretend my head was a gym, and that all the thoughts inside were just running around doing laps. Whenever a bad thought passed by the exit, I was supposed to kick it in the ass out through the doors. I remembered laughing then about my dad saying ass, but I still used that trick. If something was making me so crazy I wanted to rip my brain out through my ears, I would think about the mummies and kicking the thoughts in the ass.
I couldn't do it with this one.
Man.
Barry had told me I was the man now, and I'm pretty sure he didn't mean it in the cool way like hippies meant it.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Just think about it, Will," Barry said. "Your dad was a good man, and he'd expect you to be one too."
He patted my shoulder heavily and shuffled to his car. He was a pilot, so he had a much nicer car than my dad. Dad was a retired milkman. Milkmen made less money than pilots, but had better stories.
Everyone was going up to our house for a giant after-death feast. I had barely eaten anything since Dad died. The last thing on my list of things I ever wanted to do again was eat, but people insisted on bringing huge amounts of food to us every day. Lasagnes, cookies, random platters of cold cuts and cheese, a ham, and some asshead brought a vat of ambrosia.
Ambrosia was the barf of dead rhinos that had been shot while they were mating. I didn't know why people kept making it. I did a report on Greek mythology in Grade Seven, and I found out that ambrosia was supposed to be the nectar of the gods. Regurgitated green jelly with vegetable bits and marshmallows shoved in like a bad art project wasn't fit for human consumption, never mind the gods.
We got back to the house after everyone else. Someone offered me a beer, and someone else shoved a huge bottle of Glenfiddich whiskey in my face. The boozy stench made me gag, and I shoved the bottle away. It slipped out of the well-wishing griever's hand and smashed on to the floor. He gave me a look of 'poor kid' and went in search of more booze.
I didn't want to be around anyone.
I wanted to be alone.
I had no idea how to be a man. The only man I'd ever known, the only one I looked up to that had never truly let me down, was on his way to be turned into ash. I wandered around the party for a few more minutes, and felt weird about thinking of it as a party.
My sisters were all sitting together on the couch, staring straight ahead and holding a plate of food on their laps. None of the food had been touched. I didn't even know where my brother was. He was where I wanted to be, which was alone. Seeing the three girls sitting there, staring at the wall with those lost, blank expressions really drove Barry's point home. These people needed someone to get them through this. Mum couldn't do it all by herself. I wasn't going to be the father figure or husband character, but I could be a man. Whatever that meant, I could be a man. I just didn't know how.
Dad?
Yes, son?
I can‟t breathe.
I know.
It hurts.
Do you want me to carry you?
That's okay.
Okay.
Can we get a movie?
Sure.
And pizza?
Yeah.
Ice cream?
Okay.
I cried.
Don't worry, baby.
Dad? Are you crying?
No.
I'm okay, Dad.
I know.
It was just an asthma attack.
I know.
Thanks for coming to get me.
You're my son.
I love you, Dad.