If I Should Wake Before I Die

The Funeral You arrive by limousine, dressed in black, matching the vehicle. You don’t want to be here. Two men help you from the car but you don’t thank them. Your family has been taken from you and you are angry. It’s not fair. Driving While Intoxicated, that’s what the police report said. And though it’s maddening, the reason is less important than the fact that you will never spend another Christmas with them again. The tiny faces of your children will be frozen in your memory, never growing older, until they gradually fade with the advancing years. As you approach the gravesite a light mist begins to fall. It’s unseasonably cool for July. A few umbrellas go up from the more prepared in the crowd. Like you, they are dressed in black. Some are crying, though you are not. You can’t. The disbelief, even now, is overwhelming. Here you are, only feet from them, and yet there is nothing so wide in all of human experience as the chasm that separates them from you now. You have tried not to let the thoughts of that day punish you—they cannot change what has happened—but in another way, there doesn’t seem to be punishment enough. Independence Day. It was just the four of you, a picnic by the river—that was your idea and the two girls had loved it. You remember having to take the old station wagon—the previous owner had removed the seat belts and they were still in the back on the floor—because there was a problem with the thermostat in the sedan. The water was cool and the sun hot. It was a day filled with hot dogs and firecrackers, the squeals of delight that only little girls can make, and crying over skinned knees and lost marshmallows in the fire. The beach was an entirely secluded spot that only you had known about and, at one point, while the girls were napping in the car, the two of you stole off into the woods to make love. But in the end, which all good things must come to, you threw dirt over the campfire, packed up the leftovers, and sent the girls on one last search for stray candy wrappers and lone sandals. It was a fine day and you remember looking at your nose in the rearview mirror as you backed out, wondering if it would peel the next day. Now you can’t remember if it ever did. The preacher begins to spout off his inane dogma about the afterlife being such a great place, and watching from on high, and smiling down on the bereaved, and such bullshit that you wished like hell you could strangle him with your own hands and throw him in a fucking hole in the ground. You can’t believe you permitted this. But then some other people begin to talk and you tune them out. You remember coming up to that corner by the railroad tracks, the one you were always reading about in the paper. It seemed like every weekend someone was killed on that damned corner. There were reflectorized signs, there were guardrails, they had even gone so far as to lower the speed limit a mile before and a mile after, although you could never see what the problem was. But then you’d never been drinking so much, either. You’d been drinking for the better part of the day and it hadn’t seemed to really affect you. You’d been sweating it out, snacking on junk food—hell you’d even been swimming and had felt fine. But after dinner, while the kids were roasting marshmallows and you were waiting for it to get dark enough to light up the sparklers, that was when you really started knocking them back. It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal, until you got to that corner. You remember letting out a big yawn just as you were turning into it. You were ignoring the speed limit change, and one of the girls was kicking the underside of your seat. You reached back without looking to give her a smack, and missed, so you turned to look the next time. Things happened pretty fast after that. There was the scream, you felt the gravel of the shoulder under your right front tire, you overcorrected, and then there were the headlights. Head-on collision. It was fairly routine after that. Sirens, ride in the ambulance, visit to the hospital, the usual. Dead on arrival. They are gone from you forever and the knowledge that is was your fault doesn’t seem like enough punishment, so there’s always the fact that the guy driving the other car was killed too. There is a lull in the ceremony and finally, mercifully, the casket is lowered. It’s almost over. They might be back to talk to this plot of ground but you doubt you ever will. Pain like this, once in a lifetime seems more than enough. Then they all pick up handfuls of dirt and toss them down on top of the varnished lid of the box that cocoons your lifeless body. The girls are crying now and so you decide to cut out early. You’re not sure where you’re going and you’re not sure you care. Your family will leave this place in a few minutes, go back to school, the job. In a few years there will probably be a remarriage, somebody else sleeping on your side of the bed, a new stepparent to read bedtime stories. And though it’s the worst punishment imaginable, to be out of their lives forever, it still doesn’t seem like enough.