Rob v. Funerals

ROB V. FUNERALS

(Or “why I loved my grandmother, but hated her wake – and hope that when I die, I’m outlived by at least one friend who will have the balls to notify everyone of my demise by altering the voicemail prompt on my cellphone to say, “If you want to pay your last respects to Rob, please come to the White Sands dunes of New Mexico where I plan to burn his skinny, pale carcass, drink Hendrick’s gin and read some of the more difficult passages from ‘Infinite Jest.’”)

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I almost wrote this column about the lack of transparency/sincerity in the arts (after finishing a freelance job for which I had to answer a magazine Q&A for a very gifted/successful photographer who felt pressured to sound “smarter” and “more conceptual” to impress a bunch of art-world bozos) or the inefficiency of the internet to help one definitively self-diagnose abdominal pain (after a week of wondering if the dull ache in my right side was the byproduct of the 5k I recently ran or the night of pounding beer, beer, beer that followed at Spitzer's, Vol de Nuit and Rabbit Club).

But how much can you really write about the unfortunate necessity of appealing to superficial would-be patrons/curators or the effects of fat deposits on the livers of surprisingly fast short-distance runners? And wouldn’t laying out some oblique wishes for my funeral be more important if I am, in fact, killed by cirrhosis/ hepatitis/ swallowing a blue Lego than some swan-song screed about how “juxtaposition” is just a douchey way of saying that when something is next to something else it changes the perception of each?

I think so too...

So… my grandma died. It was no surprise – she’d been zonked for weeks after a pair of pretty shitty strokes. She was 87 – almost 88 – but surprisingly lucid and able to maintain a sharp wit that didn’t so much make her funny as it made her feisty and very likeable. (If she didn’t like someone, she wouldn’t wait until everyone got in the car to leave and say, “someone should have really put that guy in his place,” like I always do. She’d hold up her finger until he stopped blathering on about the Federal Reserve and cured meats and say, “you know, I like salami and applaud the regulatory achievements of elastic currency policies – and I think you’re really a jerk.”) She also had a bonkers memory and always made it a point to remember everyone’s birthday, anniversary or, in my case, favorite Lego flavor.

And for a million other reasons, I’m really gonna miss her. But as the subhead implies – I hated her wake/funeral. And I shouldn’t even really use that pronoun to make it exclusive, because I hate all wakes/funerals. And (Start a third consecutive sentence with “and?” Don’t mind if I do!) not because of the represented loss or the big impermanence reminders or because I have to have the same conversations with everyone in my family; confess that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life and try to explain to a Mary Higgins Clark-crowd the plot of a new manuscript that relies heavily on post-modern devices (and the dialogue of a talking umbrella).

Yes, that’s part of it, but no…

What really has my boxer-briefs in a twist is more the general approach to death at those things – the drugging and painting of the deceased to retain some (creepy) semblance of life. The formality of the dress, the pomp of the ceremony, the tone of conversations over casino rugs and chordal music in funeral homes that look like they were built by architectural firms that usually design those stand-alone Mom-and-Pop donut shops that you see all over So-Cal and make you ask “did that covered carpark for the hearse use to be a drive-thru window?” and “why do we just have whack Dunkin Donuts out here?” Then there’s the way some Catholics I know make such a thorough and awkward juggling act out of the celebrating/mourning/doubting of life/death/“eternal life” that the word “respectively” quickly goes M.I.A. and any of those verbs on any given day can match up with any of those concepts without any real difficulty. It’s some kind of holy slot machine effect absent of confidence – and it scares the shit out of me.

Is it just because I don’t really believe in God/an afterlife (or the idea that it should cost $6,000+ to die) that these things disgust me?

Hmmm.

On a recent road trip my friend Phil and I had a long rambling conversation about the way we (21^st-century Americans? Catholics? Everyone ever maybe…) treat death in life, that is, the way we talk about (or don’t, as it were) the inevitability that we’re gonna die. And I know that’s a separate rant, as this is “Rob Vs. Funerals” and not “Rob Vs. What Causes Funerals,” but there’s a root there that shouldn’t be overlooked, lest it be tripped over – a repressed tickle that might make you ask “what’s so taboo about death” and “would we be able to come to terms with passings a little less artificially if, perhaps, we hadn’t been brought up believing that its acceptance as an natural inevitability was morbid and morbidity was bad?”

And what really sucks – and maybe it’s my fault – is that this is what I think about during funerals… I don’t honor or mourn or remember. I sit and stare in corners and think about how fucked the common ideas of death seem, how they breed situations like these, how I’d be a lot more comfortable if everyone stopped loosely hugging me and asking me about my car and just let me read them portions of “Leaves of Grass,” how I don’t want this when I die.

And maybe – as Phil would say – “some people do.”

And “you have to respect that.”

And that’s usually the point in the conversation (“you know, shoe on the other foot, man…”) when I get silent, turn up the radio and ignore him/think about myself.

Again, don’t mind if I do:

So, fuck the flowers, fuck the casket, fuck the two days of pretending to mourn me while passing the so-slow time talking about the new Droid and MPG-ratings and what a bitch the bridge traffic is, fuck the soft-spoken white-hair man who has to try to wipe the smirk off my dead face and recreate my five-o’clock shadow with some super-duper fine-point Sharpie made specifically for morticians.

Fuck that.

Burn me in the desert (a la Gram Parsons)

Gather around with your favorite alcohol/drug/golf club.

Bring a dog.

A crossbow.

Laugh amongst yourselves about how much money I owe each of you; about the time I vomited during the moment of silence at a Sept. 11^th memorial and, later, had to leave my underpants balled up in the corner of a bathroom; or the time I shit on the hood of a car after making Kevin pick-up a $250 tab on Paddy’s Day; the time I passed out on the lawn of a funeral home/in your baby’s playpen/ on your brother’s roof/in a booth at the San Gennaro feast.

Just no nonsense about dust to dust…

No kneeling and praying.

No throwing a stupid rose.

Laugh and yawp and giggle ‘til you heave… toss a Frisbee… order a pizza… throw blue Legos into the blond flames above the blindingly white sands and say, “I think he woulda liked the juxtaposition.”