A New Kind of Bliss Read Free

smiled at all of us, the family he loved so much. In my heart I felt that he’d known all of us were there and that he only had another half hour or so of life left. It was like he was trying to tell us that it was all right, that he was ready to go and we shouldn’t be sad…words he could not audibly express because of the tube in his throat. Thank God I’d gotten into town when I did and was there to see the face I knew so well that one last time. But I’d give anything if I could have heard his voice as well.
    “Emmylou,” he used to call me. His mother’s name had been Louise, and he made that my middle name, in honor of her. She’d died when he was a boy, and now he was with her after a separation of nearly seventy years. Could that have been why he died with a smile on his face? Big drops of tears spilled from my eyelids. I didn’t bother to wipe them away.
     
    The wake and funeral were being held at the A.M.E. church our family had attended for as long as I could remember. We opted for only one wake; more than that would be too much of an emotional burden. Telephone calls had been made to close family friends, and the obituary had run in the Euliss Daily Dispatch.
    I recalled the countless times I had opened letters from Mom and a folded piece of newsprint paper had fallen out, making me ponder, Who died now? always holding my breath a little as I unfolded it, knowing I would see a familiar name. Even miles from home the Dispatch was still part of my life. I’d be forty-three in a few months, and many of my friends had lost one or even both parents by this point in their lives. Now it was my turn.
    It soon became apparent that we were going to have what is generally referred to as a good turnout. For some reason folks in Euliss like to brag about how many people show up at wakes and funerals, the same as they do about how late people stay when they give a party. Does it really make a difference how popular a person is when they’re dead?
    The first arrivals were relatives, longtime friends, neighbors, and people from church, folks my parents’ age whom I’d known all my life. I hadn’t seen many of them in years, and they all looked a little smaller, a little grayer, and moved a lot slower.
    The younger set showed up a little later. Even my brother’s and sister’s friends had that definite over-fifty look. I saw a lot of matronly looking women, and men with bulging bellies, raggedy gray hair a lá Fred Sanford, or shaved heads, which I suspected was their way of coping with receding hair-lines. Where had the time gone? Even my nieces and nephews were adults now. Cissy’s daughter, my parents’ oldest grandchild, was thirty-one, a mere dozen years my junior. Sonny’s two boys and Cissy’s son were all in their mid-to late twenties. Only Sonny’s seventeen-year-old daughter still seemed young enough to feel like a niece.
    I sat in the first pew with my arm draped around Mom’s shoulders, periodically asking, “You all right?” and looking at the nearly two dozen floral designs, including the ones purchased by Mom, Sonny, Cissy, and myself, and the grandchildren. Only two were blanketed, but despite having cheerful colors, they practically screamed out, “Funeral!” The others were in wicker baskets or plastic containers and came in different colors, shapes, and sizes.
    Mom was handling her stress and grief just fine, and I was proud of her. My own marriage had become a statistic after six years, and I couldn’t imagine being married to someone for five-and-a-half decades. You’ve got to feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself.
    Mom eventually went off to huddle with her closest friends, the group from her twice monthly bid whist game. They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, but I could just imagine the inane remarks being made. I was surprised that older folks, who surely had been touched more by death than the young, didn’t seem to have anything better to say than