The Counting-Downers Read Free Page A

At the mercy of paper-thin walls, I’m an unwelcome intruder in her most private moments. She doesn’t know I also lost the ability to sleep at exactly the same time my father lost his life.
    Or maybe she does. How sad that we both lie awake at night, each cascading silent tears and whispering our pointless pleas in isolation. I don’t go to her and she doesn’t come to me. Instead, we lay separated by brick and plaster, drowning in our own grief until the dawning of another day without him.
    I know I can go to her, but her tears will dry in an instant. She’ll need to be strong for me, instead of allowing us to be weak together. My father taught me that you need to be able to be weak so that you can continue being strong. Everyone needs something or someone they can reveal their weaknesses to. For my mother, it was always and only ever him.
    It’s a poor substitute, but now she can only be weak and vulnerable when the lights are off and she’s alone. I know she needs it in order to keep breathing and moving for my sake and my brother’s. So I let her have midnight. And solitude.
    The daytime, however, belongs to everyone else. Today belongs to everyone else. My mom knows it, and so do I.
    Clearing my throat, I give my own brief eulogy to an audience of one and a half. “Dad taught me to be an individual. He told me happiness lay in finding yourself, expressing yourself, and always trusting and staying true to the person you discovered.
    “I know you don’t always appreciate my style, but this is who I am, Mom. The boots, the braids, the flowers. Daddy helped me find and express this person, and now I have to do the final part and stay true to it. It’s what he would want. To do otherwise and pretend to be someone else, even just for a day, would go against his wishes. In being me, I’m honoring him.”
    Something that looks a lot like comprehension and sadness lights up her dim jade eyes for a brief second before fading out just as fast. “I understand, he’d be proud.”
    Before she excuses herself for a final appearance check in the bathroom that I know is just a reason to collect herself, she asks me to try to wrestle a defiant Oscar into the bow tie one last time.
    And I wonder if she understood at all.

 

     
    SITTING ON THE beach my father loved so much, with a fidgeting, bow tie-less Oscar in my lap and my stoic mother next to me clutching the urn to her chest, I draw my gaze away from the magnificent ocean to look around at the people who are gathered here to say goodbye.
    I’ve never even said ‘hello’ to most of these people.
    I think a funeral is the ultimate testament to how you lived your life. Although I was only little, I remember that when my great aunt Mara died, the people who had come to mourn had to stand on the steps and street as the church was at full capacity.
    Can you imagine filling out a church? That’s a sign of a life well lived, when there’s no sitting room at your funeral.
    No spare seats are available today either.
    I wonder how many seats would fill at my funeral if I were to die tomorrow. My family would come, but who else?
    Would some of the many people who’d made it their job to ignore me in high school show up out of guilt, or the need to keep up appearances? Would they talk to people about how wonderful I was, even though they never talked to me when I was alive?
    I hate that, don’t you? When people die, those who never knew them at all are always the ones who seem to take it the hardest. Something strange happens to people when their acquaintances die, infusing their brains with a misplaced sense of nostalgia and closeness which never existed.
    They’re the ones who can be found bawling graveside, while the family is sitting dry-eyed and unimpressed, or who come up with the most poetic words and falsified memories about the character of a virtual stranger.
    I’m not saying you can’t experience sadness when someone dies. I’d worry about someone’s