A short story called "The Funeral"

The Funeral

Tom was sitting on a pew in the small chapel, surrounded by crying people. Some peoples’ eyes were just welling with tears, while others were full-blown weeping, tears streaming down their faces, eyes being dabbed with handkerchiefs. Some bodies were even being racked. His mum, sitting just to his left, wasn’t that grief-stricken, but she was obviously crying.

Tom, however, felt very little. Except confused, that is. He wondered if his expression was sufficiently sombre; he exaggerated his frown just to make sure. He wondered if he should make a bigger show of sadness and solicitude. Should he try to cry? No – that would be dishonest. But he didn’t know if he should be feeling more emotion. After all, Ma was his great-grandmother, he did visit her fairly often. Then again, he never really knew her. She was always just a frail, gaunt, liver-spotted reptilianly-wrinkly old woman with a soft croaky voice who lived in a nursing home with her own room which had a placard next to the front door reading ‘Coral Mae Lye’. That was such a strange name, wasn’t it? She was always just a nice, perpetually smiling old lady who that one time they’d walked into her room had been watching some Royal ceremony or something on the ABC on her box TV, and who seemed to like scones with jam and cream when they went to that café to get them those few times, and who used to be Tom’s mum’s grandma, the mother of mum’s dead mum, and a long time ago used to have a husband whom everyone called ‘Pa’, with whom she used to live in a lovely house and grow lots of vegetables, and when his mum was a kid she used to visit Ma and Pa at their house a lot with Nerida and Ma used to make Pumpkin scones for her and Nerida and they were delicious according to mum. Pumpkin scones didn’t sound at all delicious to Tom.

The last time Tom had seen Ma was at her surprise 100^th birthday party. As he had sat crouched under the table in the RSL club function room, he remembered he had been a little worried that when Ma walked in and they all shouted “Happy Birthday Ma” and she saw the big banner saying “100” and all her grinning family members, the decades of them standing next to the tables arrayed around the big room, she would have a heart attack or something. And he had been very worried that she might not believe she were 100. It’s not like she seemed that demented, but he knew he personally couldn’t imagine being 100. 100, it was so old. He imagined that old people constantly forgot how old they were, had moments were they just forgot everything about their current situation, were 50 again – that is, until they caught a glance in the mirror. But when Ma walked in and everyone stood up and shouted “Happy Birthday” and she saw that so many people, some of whom she hadn’t seen for years, cared so much about her, she looked really happy.

After that moment, the day had stopped being about her. By Tom’s reckoning anyway. When dad had said that after lunch he would recruit Toby and muster up some cousins to play a cricket match on the grass outside, Tom had been really excited. He had thought he was going to star in the match, what with his rep cricket credentials and his fast bowling, opening batting and catching skills. He had thought he was going to impress Toby a lot, as well as that girl distant relative whom he’d never met before. Unfortunately, while he did impress Toby in the pre-game catching game, in the match the dream didn’t pan out and Tom ended up embarrassing himself after getting out bowled. After he attempted a huge hoik and the ball hit the tree they were using as the wicket, he was so disappointed and frustrated that he ended up having a tantrum. Toby had looked really unimpressed.

The coffin was moving off the stage on a noisy industrial conveyor belt, heading towards a furnace. To Tom, the idea of being cremated was terrifying. It seemed positively infernal. In his mind’s eye he could see flames engulfing a coffin, burning fiercely, crackling, all the while him, the deceased, possibly still alive, screaming but not being heard, feeling the air outside the coffin get hotter and hotter until… The rest was too confronting to imagine.

Generally, this place seemed a bit miserable to Tom. The idea of having his remains dealt with in such a dreary, unceremonious setting was very unattractive. But his mum seemed like she was too preoccupied with her grief to care about the aesthetic of the place. As Tom looked at her, she was drying her tears with a handkerchief, like people did in movies. She looked at him and smiled. In return, Tom attempted to add a subtle smile to his sombre look.

Miranda, who was sitting on the opposite side of their parents and who had tears on her face, then said something to mum and dad. Tom began to look around the room. He looked at the middle-aged man who had spoken, at various relatives, some of whom he obviously recognised, like Nerida, Angus and Charlotte, and a lot he didn’t. Most of them were crying. When he looked across the pew, he noticed even his dad had tears in his eyes.

The coffin had moved out of sight and the red curtains had closed on the stage. Everyone began to get up. The pews scraped loudly against the floor. Tom, leading his family in the tight crowd of mourners, shuffled out of the chapel and into the sun.

He was relieved it was over.