the feeling before the funeral

Information moves faster in June than any other month. Maybe it’s the graduations, reunions, physical get togethers primed for the rapid spread of gossip, always both true and false. Maybe it’s the airiness of Gemini, the quickest wit of the zodiac. Maybe it’s the heat and its affect on those of us who live in hot places that only get hot and hotter. I always live in hot places.

Death shouldn’t happen in June and neither should bombs. Only births and baptisms and bridal showers and plans made six months before, in winter.

My mother sends a link titled funeral and cremation pre-planning to the group chat with me, my sister, and her mother. I am sitting at my new vanity in my bathroom slash office, about to draw myself a bath with lots of epsom salt and no essential oils.

Samaya is staying with us for the weekend, in town for a cousin’s wedding. It’s Saturday afternoon and she’s there now. My in laws are in town and we had a huge arepa brunch with prosecco and took naps and went in the pool. It feels so good to have my house filled with people I love so much. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

Every second alone and especially at night I get itchy all over.

In Miami, my grandmother is dying. It has been eleven days of hospice. She stopped eating on Tuesday. I want to hug my father and I know that the next time we do will be because his mother has died and I’m taking Mateo to swim class and processing that while I clap and cheer him on. He is swimming so well and he asks if we are proud him and we are so proud of him.

abuela Marta tia Liz & mom at nordstrom, early 2000s

When I was in the fourth grade, I wanted Natalie Phillips to be my teacher because she was the most beautiful woman I had seen at my school but I didn’t get her and it bothered me. I never knew her. Then one day, in February, a month where it seems death is more appropriate than it is in June, Sister Margaret or someone of similar ranking came into our classroom to tell us that she had succumbed to her brain tumor and died. I had never spoken to her but I cried the entire mass in an all consuming obnoxious selfish kind of way. She was only 25. I was eleven.

I looked up her obituary online because I had no idea what month she had passed I just knew it wasn’t June.

Most comments are from February 2008. Messages to the family. The recent ones are directed to her. The recent ones are written by the women who should’ve never have had to bury her.

Carmen tells me that grief is just love and I’ll leave it at that for now.