When I was a kid my family used to put together letters for funeral parlors to earn some extra money. We’d fold the letters a certain way, put them in the correct envelop, and seal them. I always got a lot of paper cuts from doing this. The letters were then sent out to families who had an old family member. I remember seeing a letter for a family who had the same last name as mine once. Could you imagine getting a letter that tells you that you should probably start financially planning for your loved ones death? Or being old and getting one? A reminder of your mortality in the form of mail from your local funeral parlor. My uncle used to work at a funeral parlor. He was a mortician. He sells kitchenware now and is the type of guy to tell pet store employees that their fish are dead. I’ve had a lot of fish in my life. And cats. And dogs. And lizards. And rodents. Just a lot of animals in general. Having a lot of pets also means having a lot of pet deaths. My mom thinks a big part of having pets is to prepare us for the deaths of people. I’ve been to two funerals these past five years. Both of them were during the summer. The worst time of the year to have a funeral. I hope I don’t die in the summer. I didn’t know either person very well, but their deaths affected my life greatly. Death has a funny way of bringing out the truth. The first person to die was my Great-Grandfather. He was the grandma on my mom’s side dad. I only ever saw him alive twice. The first time was at a wedding, I didn’t like him the moment I laid eyes on him. I didn’t have a specific reason to not like him, but something just felt off. The second time I saw him was when he was in the retirement home. He had Alzheimers then and pretended to know who we were when we introduced ourselves. He played it off pretty well, the only reason I know he was faking it is because my mom told me after we left that if he really remembered us he would have talked our ears off. When he died, I found out a lot about my mom’s side of the family that I didn’t want to know. I remember texting my cousins about everything , trying to piece it all together while I was at a friends house. I wasn’t happy with what we found. I didn’t want to go back home after that. I remember whispering something cruel to his casket. My grandma would have slapped me if she had found out. She believes we should never talk bad about the dead. Even if they were bad people. I used to think everyone deserved a fueneral before I heard about my not-so-great-grandfather. The second person to die was my Great-Aunt. I never saw her while she was alive. We were friends on facebook, though. My mom asked me to draw a portrait of her to give to her kids. Drawing a dead person for five hours straight is kind of weird. Makes you think. Her funeral really made me rethink a lot of who I was. All I knew about her was what people were saying about her in their eulogies. They said that she loved God and talking, but how could I be sure if that was true? They could be lying. Or maybe they just only knew what she showed them? Maybe that was just a facade. What if she had a secret side of her that her family didn’t know about? People like me would never know. I had a thought, “If I died right here, right now, would any of my family know who I really am?” Your family is an essential part of how you are remembered when you die. I don’t want people saying that I love God at my funeral. I don’t want them to read bible verses. That funeral is what made me decide I wanted to stop being distant. Up until then I was terrified of letting my family get to know me, because all my life I was told that they could never love me for being a heathen queer. But at that point, I’d rather die and be remembered as a heathen queer than die and be remembered as someone that I wasn’t. So, I came out to them. It went pretty well. I can be more myself around them now and I’ve never felt more free. Some of them didn’t accept me, but I was prepared to live with that. Death is a weird thing. It made me distant from my family and closer. It can destroy and build up. Like a volcano.
