ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I have just come to the end of what might have been the most difficult week of my life to date. When I got up this morning to sift through my massive e-mail backlog, I had a message from NaBloPoMo letting me know that the blogging theme for the month of June is “home”, which is something I have reflected on continually over the past few days. So in tribute to the concept of home and family, I dedicate the month of June to my brother-in-law, who died Monday night in a car accident.

The details are not all that important for readers outside the family, but sometime in the early hours of Tuesday morning, we got the phone call from my boyfriend’s father. By later that morning family had already begun to gather at our house as a way point for the journey down from Iowa, and by the next day we had made arrangements to be gone from work the rest of the week and had made the drive down to his father’s house ourselves.

The first two days were the hardest. All the awful phone calls had to be made to work, relatives, friends, and other family members. Funeral music had to be chosen. Everyone began sifting through family photos to choose pictures for the viewing on Friday night. I felt so useless, as if I had no specified function, but it felt somehow inappropriate to do anything but sit around and feel somber. By Thursday morning I felt mentally and emotionally exhausted, and since I could not stand the thought of going with my boyfriend and his parents to help choose monuments and pick out a cemetery plot, I went down to Wichita, which had become his mother’s family’s base of operations, and spent the day with all the cousins on that side of the family, including my sister-in-law, who graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago.

On Wednesday night, the girl my brother-in-law was living with had come with us down to Wichita to eat dinner with the family, and on the drive back she spoke briefly on the phone with one of their mutual friends and volunteered that such and such person wanted “a song called ‘Free Bird’ played at the funeral, do you know that one?” Her suggestion was immediately, though tactfully, vetoed by all present. Since then, however, a desperate knot of gallows humor had begun building somewhere inside me, some kind of inappropriate and strange reaction to this miserable situation that made me want to give up any pretense of dignity and just cackle maniacally at the whole thing.

I stifled the urge I had to cry and laugh hysterically at the same time, and instead spent most of Thursday trying to extract some sense of normalcy from life. So those of us who had no concrete role in the whole planning process, other than to be emotionally supportive, spent the day in pursuit of frivolous diversion. We spent the evening working on craft projects and I told the cousins, many of whom are no longer minors, some cautionary tales of my college years. It was deeply comforting after a fashion, to spend the day with a group of other people who could not for the moment bear to take any more time thinking about what had happened earlier in the week.

The viewing was Friday and the funeral Saturday. By Friday afternoon the tension had reached a high point, so my sister-in-law and I had a long, cathartic conversation in the car during the hour-long trip from Wichita up to my boyfriend’s father’s house. I think that having moved past the point of trying to stop thinking about everything the day before, we had each been yearning for a chance to talk openly with someone about the accident, but hadn’t wanted to make other family members uncomfortable by bluntly bringing up such a sensitive topic. It was, for me at least, a relief to simply talk frankly about what had happened and to explore our mutual emotional responses to his death. It was also comforting to realize that I was not the only one who needed a break from the heartbreaking sorrow we had all been experiencing during the week.

Later, she and I left the mortuary early and drove out to her brother’s farm to look around while the girl he lived with and his other friends were still at the viewing. Neither of us had ever seen his place before and it seemed most fitting that she be able to see it for the first time without any of them around. We’d heard from other family members that he had recently gotten some piglets, so the pigpen was our first stop.

In full funeral dress, she kicked off her shoes and the modest little sweater she was wearing, climbed into the pen and approached the four piglets, who grunted nervously and huddled in one corner. As she walked toward them, they broke and ran along the side of the pen, making frightened oinking sounds. They stopped when they saw me standing by the gate.

“Make them run my way!” she urged. I looked down at my black pumps and dress, and took a halfhearted step toward the mass of piglets, who broke and ran back the opposite way. As they ran by her, she reached her hand out and managed to touch one on the haunches. The piglet stiffened and screamed as though she were poison, then ran to join his companions.

“Don’t try to catch one,” I begged. “It will only end badly. They’re too wild. If you get one it’s just going to kick and scream and shit all over your dress.”

She reluctantly agreed to give up attempting to catch the piglets, and we closed up the gate, wandered around the property a little bit, and climbed over a large gate to leave. “I wish we could have a picture of this to remember how funny this looks,” she said.

I had to agree that there was a certain dark humor inherent to trespassing all over her dead brother’s property in our funeral outfits. “Go get my camera out of the car,” I said. She ran to get it. I spent the next half hour photographically documenting her efforts to, figuratively speaking, mark her territory all over the farm where her brother had lived. I approved of this and felt that he would have as well. He was two grades behind me in high school, so I didn’t know him as well as I could have, but I did know for certain that he was a good-natured goof who loved exploring new avenues of orneriness.

In honor of a young man who would have heartily appreciated our strange tribute, I present the following: