In summer of 2008, 6 of my relatives died within 2 months. I
attended a lot of funerals that summer. The one that sticks with me the most is
my cousin Holly’s. She was 2 years old when she was hit by a truck. They
shipped her off to the hospital, but it was too late. She was brain-dead. They
donated her organs, and I drove down to California to attend the funeral.
They
had one of those tiny baby coffins, which are somehow a hundred times worse
than an adult coffin. They buried her in a dress that matched her favourite doll,
which was also buried with her. Her mother cut off all her hair the day before
and set a lock of it in the coffin. Holly looked plastic—very similar to her
doll in that way.
All
the cousins were supposed to stand up at her funeral and sing some church song.
I was crying to hard to even get a word out. It’s not like I knew her very
well. We live very far away, and so I never got to interact with her much. The
thing that got me was how young she was, she hadn’t even lived yet. And the
look on her father’s face. He looked like he was missing something. At the
burial site, they played the bagpipes.
My grandmother died the same year, only a week or two before Holly did.
She died of MS, which she had been fighting her entire life. She had been
bedridden for most of my life. She used to stare out the window and watch the
birds. Grandpa put up hummingbird feeders and bird baths and the such to
attract the animals. She used to love to watch the hummingbirds. I don’t
remember much about her funeral. My dad cried, which was painful for me because
I had never see him cry before. (To date, I have only seen him cry 2 times.
Once at his mother’s funeral, and again at his father’s). The coffin was decorated
with hummingbirds, and there were flowers everywhere. It was beautiful. She
would have liked it. We sang God Be With
You ‘Til We Meet Again. I still cry when I sing that song.
