Untitled by Kristin Ginger

The world gets soft, the night gets dark, and we get high. Katie exhales into my face and I open my mouth to taste her breath. Her back porch is huge. We run over it and into the yard, we dance across the lawn that her father just mowed (“people will be coming,” he said), we move in lazy stumbling circles, the wind in our hair.

I grab Katie’s hands and spin her around me, singing “ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy, we all fall down!” I let her go, but she doesn’t fall. I step toward her and sit down hard on the grass, panting. We both look up at the sky, at the uncertain clouds thick and quick across the moon, whose light fills in the white of our faces, bare arms, and feet.

“Katie,” my voice falls into the darkness. “You’ve gotta write it soon.”

“I know.” she says. The words are loose in the breeze: I, aye, eye, know, no, no. She starts to cry, and my fingers pull up freshly cut grass from the roots and place it into my mouth.

In some areas of Tibet, water burial is common for everyone, not just the poor. The dead are dismembered and given to the river. Fish whisper up from the depths and nibble at the flesh until only bones are left, picked clean by the current.

Sometimes the people don’t eat the fish from these rivers. And sometimes they do.

We sit on her bed. I am preoccupied with the wallpaper, the comforter, and my bones. The fan swirls air down from Katie’s ceiling, into and out of my lungs, and I spend a moment imagining the fan and my healthy pink lungs working together in artificial respiration. When I realize that I’m fixating on myself, that all I can think of is my own body and that my own grief is starting to faintly slip into focus, I give my head a sharp shake. I try not to feel guilty for still having a mother.

“Where do I even start, Julie?” Katie’s voice breaks into my breathing. My eyes focus on her neatly curled hair, her tongue-pink nails digging into a still-blank notebook. She’d be horrified if I told her that her nose and upper lip are raw from snot. Knowing I’m still high, and glad for it, I mentally scoop the organs out of my body, empty myself for her or her grief, her anger, her anything. I try to feel her thoughts, to let her slice me in two with frustration or sadness or relief. But nothing comes. Of course, nothing comes. I can’t be her for her, I can’t ask her to use me, make this about us. I go back to her question. Where do eulogies begin? Where does being a daughter start, or end?

“Fuck.” I close my eyes.

“Fuck?” Katie stares at me, nostrils wide.

“Fuck.”

“…fuck.”

“Fuck.”

The more we say it, the more it loses meaning and the more it sums up everything: mango-colored oxygen tanks, paperbacks slipping from her mother’s limp fingers, the dozens of casserole dishes filled with kugel downstairs, the peritoneal port bruises, the sun that day, David’s sudden kosher requirements, the years ahead, the blank page looking at us from Katie’s notebook.

She writes it down, FUCK in capital letters. We stare at it until she hands me the notebook. “I can’t.” She doesn’t look at me. “You have to do it. You’re the writer, Julie, you’re a newspaper intern. Just…please.”

I know I should say no. I should tell her that whatever she writes will be fine, that her mother would want those words, not mine. Her mother would want me to say no. My mouth opens into the “o” of a fish, but nothing comes out.

I look at Katie. She’s flipping through a case of DVDs. Her face is empty.

I pick up a pen. She won’t use it, I tell myself. I start with a joke Katie would never make, end with a cliché. I recreate stories she’s told me about her mother, like the time that Andrea called her in sick and took her to the movies all day. Katie doesn’t look at it when I hand it to her. She rips out the pages and staples them together. I wait for her to throw them out, but she just drops them on her pillow. Then she asks me if I want to watch something, anything. I pretend that I do. She grabs my fingers and we go downstairs.

I have no way of knowing if Andrea asked me to take care of her daughter before dying. I’ve lied to myself and everyone else until she could have said exactly that, “please take care of Katie,” or nothing at all. Maybe she just thanked me for being a good friend to her daughter, but the smooth flesh-colored coils of my actual memory are utterly blank. All I can create behind my eyelids is that afternoon that I came over to find Katie gone and Andrea there, on the family room couch she lived on for three months toward the end. I was home from college for the weekend; it was my own mother’s fiftieth birthday.

Andrea was wrapped in yellow and purple fleece blanket, the brightness harsh against her bleached skin. I can remember brushing against oxygen tanks as I knelt down next to her. I gave her the flowers my own mother had pushed into my hands as I walked out the door.

And I can see her mouth moving, but her lips slip words past me, like she’s whispering to me underwater. I was always a revisionist—I just never realized I could revise the context for death.

The Romans word arpagus refers to an infant who died in its cradle. Originally these children were not burned, buried, or given funerals, monuments, epitaphs, or other ceremonial remembrances. In later times, however, the Romans began to burn those infants that had lived to forty days and begun teething. These children were called rapti. The Greeks, who used the same words for their deceased infants, would never bury their children during full night or day, but only during Ἡμέρας ἀρπαγίω, the gray dawn just before morning appeared.

We’ve watched an hour of aimless TV and are finishing off our second batch of kugel, coming off the high, when Katie’s older brother David comes into the kitchen. We hand him a spoon and keep eating straight from the dish, picking it clean and then licking our forks.

“Katie,” he says to his sister. “I need someone to look at mine.” He avoids my eyes, looking only at her and the kugel. I can count on my fingers the number of times he’s made eye contact with me. When he’s home from grad school we run into each other and make small talk. Katie told me it was better that David had been away for most of their mother’s illness. “She doesn’t want him to see her, anyway,” Katie had said. “He’s not good with emotions. He’s, like, socially constipated. He loves her, but he doesn’t need to watch her die.” He didn’t have friends at school and said it would interfere with his studies and religious devotion.

“David…” Katie twists her mouth, and whatever words she was going to say disappear into her throat. I wonder what she’s thinking, if it’s anything I could even remotely imagine. We’ve only known each other for three years. The first day I hung out at her house ended up being the day we found out her mother was sick.

“I hate talking in front of people,” David says, “I at least need someone to…to proofread.” His eyes slide halfway toward me.

Someone. Katie and I don’t ask him why it can’t be Katie or maybe his grandparents, even though they’re asleep at the moment (when Grandma started hyperventilating and yelling about tissues, Katie’s aunt slipped something in her drink. “Just to get her through,” the aunt had said, and then left). I wonder if I’m “someone” for Katie too, just the person who’s keeping her from being alone with herself. Or just the editor, the girl who fixes commas and misspellings for her job, and is just a convenient proofreader for this family. I want to cry out that I just have a copy editing internship at the shitty local paper, I’m not a eulogist, but I know it wouldn’t help the situation.

David looks at me. I stand up and shrug, and we go to his room.

Tibet has nearly 1,200 sky burial sites. In Lhasa, celestial burial is more common than water burial, though more expensive. At dawn, a monk strips the flesh from the body (some dip these pieces in yak butter) and then crushes the bones into fragments small enough for the mouths of vultures.

Occasionally, for Vajrayana ritual purposes, the top parts of skulls are saved for use as teacups. What is left, the vultures devour within an hour.

David’s eulogy is awful. From the opening, “All of us have known my mother to have been a great person,” to the end, “Thank you for having known my mother.” I read the painfully worded sentences and can tell that he has agonized over each.

He flips through a pack of cards while I read it, not playing a game, not shuffling, just flipping. He nervously glances over at me from time to time, but otherwise doesn’t move. Katie says he’s brilliant, that he’s going to get a Ph.D. in chemistry. That or become a rabbi. I stare at his words on the computer screen—do people copy or sell eulogies on the internet like they do essays?

“So,” David says finally, clearing his throat. “So, what do you think?”

I look at the white scalp showing through his fine dark hair and taste chamomile tea in my mouth. “It’s,” I copy his throat-clearing, “It’s good. Really—your mom would really appreciate it. Will really appreciate it.” I try out a smile on my face and hope he sticks with chemistry.

He drops an ace onto his bed, follows it with the Queen of Spades. “You don’t…think it’s too wordy?”

I flush, thinking of how I just wrote Katie’s eulogy, and imagine the service consisting of no one’s words but my own. “No. I think it’s fine how it is—I don’t think there’s really anything to change.”

“Thanks.” David says, pausing for a moment in his card-flipping. I nod and shrug at the same time. “Do you want to watch a movie with me and Katie?”

“No,” he answers, eyes on the cards, watching them as though one might run away at any moment, “No, I think I’m going to rewrite it again.”

I pretend to believe him and click the door shut on my way out.

I never knew Andrea when she was healthy. I never even called her Andrea, not when she was alive, it was always Mrs. Flannery. What about death makes me think that now we’re on a first-name basis? I watched her hair fall out, helped her move her books and toys out of the kindergarten classroom she used to teach in, and asked Katie about her constantly for three years, but I never really knew the woman whose life was falling apart with her body.

It was a combination of voyeurism, fascination, wanting Katie to think I was a caring person, and concern that made me ask questions, made me read articles about breast cancer. As for death rites, I had been reading books about death in different cultures ever since a freshman course on the anthropology of religion. The professor had mentioned that because the ancient Teutonic people often built their temples at crossroads, and sacrificed criminals there, the intersections were looked at as execution grounds: suicides were buried at the crossroads during the night, feet above their heads to ward against the rising of the undead. Aunt Lucy in my mind, I read everything from the historical The American Way of Death to the fictional Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet.

Now I read websites about metastatic stage-four breast cancer along with those about LifeGem memorial diamonds—“a certified, high-quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one” and priapisms—post-mortem erections. Always, overshadowing any real concern, was the worry that I was only concerned because Katie was affected, or because I somehow wanted to claim this tragedy as mine: resurrect Aunt Lucy and relive her death.

Now that I am here, watching Andrea’s shell-shocked family, seeing pictures of her from all the years I never knew her, it is a reminder that forms a litany in my head: this grief is not yours. Do not claim it for your own.

This grief has nothing to do with you.

Space burial involves launching a rocket into space and releasing the cremated remains of a body there, miles and miles away from our oceans and houses and ballparks and ice cream stands.

This has been done at least one hundred and fifty times.

These are the people I’ve known who have died: my grandmother, both grandfathers, and my Aunt Lucy. It was the last who introduced death into my nine-year old world. My mother and I were in the car when she crashed, the second time I had seen Aunt Lucy in my short life.

I don’t remember the first meeting—I was an infant. The second, I will never forget: her cappuccino hair fanned out over the dashboard and fresh bone showing through her oddly twisted arm.

No one wanted me to see, of course; no one was comfortable with a nine-year old, newly alive, seeing a forty-year old, newly dead. Especially not dead in a sprawled-across-the-dashboard way, instead of dead in a dignified, wax-display way.

My grandparents’ deaths had been more civilized, natural, neat. Passing in the night, the unplugging of a machine, a heart attack. These deaths were supposed to be less disturbing than Lucy’s. But Lucy’s I had seen, and as a nine-year old I believed her death belonged to me; whether we knew one another or not, that ownership made it less disturbing than the distant unplugging of a machine.

My mother couldn’t bring herself to attend Lucy’s funeral, so I didn’t, either. The last I saw of her was from outside the car, her body pressed up against the star-fracture windshield. Somehow I always thought of the years passing and the car corroding away around her, leaving her body sprawled across the ground, until her clothes deteriorated and then her body. It was only when I was sixteen and at my grandmother’s wake that I realized with a start that I had never updated myself, had never made the connection between caskets and graveyards and Lucy’s body moving from where I left her.

Dutch doed-koecks or ‘dead-cakes’ are small bread images of the deceased and marked with their initials. They are both made and eaten by the survivors of the family, an echo of sin-eating.

Katie is finally asleep, or at least pretending to be asleep, so I’m in the kitchen making a sandwich (the aunt brought over a massive platter of cold cuts) when her dad walks in. I’ve only met Mr. Flannery a couple of times, he’s always been on business trips or at the race track—not gambling, Katie always assured me, just socializing. He was big on social networking. Big on being anywhere but home, toward the end of Andrea’s life. Katie couldn’t help but resent him for it, and I hated him for abandoning his cancerous wife, leaving his daughter to deal on her own.

“Hey.” He nods.

“Hey. Can I get you anything?” I ask before I realize I’m sitting in his kitchen.

“No, I’m good.” He opens the fridge, pulls out a head of broccoli. He leaves it in the sink with the water running over it and walks back to the fridge. He stares into it, then closes it without taking anything else out.

For a fifty-year old man, he looks sixty. His arms are covered with the same curly hair that covers Katie’s head, and it’s almost as thick. His stomach sags over his belt, trying to secede from his body. He turns off the water and starts chopping at the broccoli, dismembering it until the cutting board is filled with tiny green trees.

He looks sad—he looks as though he hasn’t slept. Suddenly I want to slap him. She wanted to divorce you. The words are sticky in my mouth, I have no business knowing them. I bite into a slice of slippery ham and imagine launching into space all alone.

“Julie? I was hoping you would do a favor for me.” He leaves the broccoli on the counter and sits at the table, making me keenly aware that I’m perched on the counter in a way my mother would hate, and I wonder what happens to the rocket after it releases the ashes.

“Sure. What is it?”

“I want my eulogy to be a surprise for Katie and David…”

Right. Of course.

“…but I was hoping to have someone read over it, first.”

I swallow. “Tonight?”

“It’s just upstairs.” He stands and takes a step toward the stairs, glancing back to make sure I’m following.

�

In Victorian England, the fear of being buried alive was so pervasive that dozens of inventors created bell-and-pulley systems for coffins to alert those above ground of a premature burial. People bought caskets with glass partitions that could be smashed by a hammer or pulley system.

They didn’t realize that these systems would fail from soil interference. Even if the glass broke, the victim would be showered in shards of glass and pounds of earth would cave in, burying them alive for the second time.

�

Mr. Flannery gestures to the double-bed that he and Andrea shared for the last five years of her life. I feel her dead skin cells clinging to my jeans as I sit, to my hands as they brush across the coverlet. Dust edges the picture frames, glass traps their faces. He shuts the door, and at the bell-like click my shoulders twitch. On the oak bureau there are three identical wigs lined up, imitations of Andrea’s hair. I look away. The air is heavy, and I wonder what about this is dangerous, because somewhere in my stomach is a worm of anticipation and the gravitational pull of tragedy. Hanging on the wall across from the bed is a mirror, and my eyes reflected in the glass say that what I’m doing here, now, is for me. I don’t want to be Andrea, or to mother Katie. I’m trying to get closer to the edge that Katie and David and Mr. Flannery are standing on, the one that overlooks Andrea, my grandparents, and yes, my Aunt Lucy. And if I’m not careful, I might succeed.

Mr. Flannery hands me a loose pile of papers, he sits a safe distance away from me, and watches as I read.

It’s well-written, and I hate him for it. If anyone deserves to deliver the one well-written eulogy at Andrea’s funeral, it’s Katie, or at least David. Not Mr. Flannery. I fidget with his punctuation, knowing I should find fault with structure and not content. He’s written about the degrees they earned, trips to Hawaii and pink sand, how they parented their children to behave and get good grades, it reads like a list of accomplishments—always theirs, nothing just about her. If eulogies are for the living and not for the dead—and maybe they are—he’s done a fantastic job of expressing himself for himself.

I point out the grammatical errors. “I put a few commas in,” I say. “Oh, and this part seemed kind of redundant.” I wish there was a way to put in a comma that would let everyone know he hadn’t been a good husband or a good father, a semicolon that said he should have gone in her place.

“Yeah, good, of course,” he agrees too readily, too quickly to read the words, which label him (twice) as a Princeton grad, full ride. “Anything else?”

“Well…” I skim. “I just switched the wording of it, here and here.”

“Yeah, good. Good. Thanks, Julie.”

I hand him the papers—too quickly? Does he notice?—and stand up.

“Yeah, good. Great. Thanks again. Thanks.” He stares at me, or through me, and even as I leave the room, shut the door, and walk down the hallway to Katie’s room, I feel him staring at the empty space I’ve just vacated from where he used to sleep with his wife.

Zoroastrians believe that four days after death, the soul leaves the body. Traditionally, they place corpses on top of the Towers of Silence: men around the outside, women in an inner ring, and children at the center. As in a Tibetan sky burial, birds of prey are left to consume the carcass. Sometimes a year later, when the bones are bleached by sun and wind, they are collected in an ossuary pit at the center of the tower. Sometimes, eventually, they wash out to sea.

Katie didn’t like talking about death, or hearing about the breast cancer articles and burial websites. Andrea, on the other hand, was what she called “realistic”—she talked about wills and life insurance, set her things in order. After a while, she didn’t speak to Katie about it much, because it clearly upset her daughter. But one afternoon before Katie came back, Andrea asked me, “Do you want a tombstone?”

“No,” I had replied, “I don’t want to…pretend there’s more left of my body than there is.” I paused, thinking. “I don’t want to be thought of as a slab of granite.”

“But what, then? Cremation?” She wasn’t looking at me, her eyes were focused on her hands.

I told her about water and vultures and returning to the earth, trying to sound normal, reasonable. I talked more quickly than usual because I was worried Katie might walk in on us. My mother found my obsession with death rituals disturbing and sick, but Andrea seemed to live in a different world than the rest of us. She just listened thoughtfully. When I finished briefly describing sky burials, I asked, “Do you know what you—”

“No.” She looked up at me for the first time. “I can’t decide if I should choose for me, or for my family. Katie will want a grave to visit.” Andrea shrugged.

In the end, she chose the compromise of cremation. Her ashes will be placed in an urn, one that Katie and her father picked out, and everyone will pretend she is still present because her remains are sitting in the living room.

I know she listened to me when I told her about Tibet and the Zoroastrians. But I can’t help feeling that if she had really understood me, had listened just a little harder, she would have chosen differently.

That if any of us really knew what we wanted, we would join the Zoroastrians and ask the wind and sun to bleach our bones.

I slide into bed next to Katie and find her hand. She fell asleep every night this past month holding her mom’s hand. With my mind I try to make mine older, more fragile, less alive. I breathe in and out, evenly, counting to five for the tide of each inhale and exhale. I don’t move, and neither does she. I look try to make out her face in the dark. I feel the blood pulsing through her palm, running through the veins of my own abdomen, and suddenly the stillness of the air and the dark of the night feel right.

I stop imagining my hand into Andrea’s. We are not dead, are not lying between our dead husbands and our dead children. We are lying in Katie’s bed under a down comforter, and the air is passing in and out of our bodies, not between our bones.

The night wears on, the moon starts to set, and sometime hours later we’re still pretending to sleep, hand in hand, breathing in, breathing out, waiting until we can pretend to be awake, and—eventually—stop pretending at all.