Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  “We have no idea,” Marie tells the woman. “We just fell out of the sky moments ago. What’s the weatherman saying, do you know?”

  Not so good for today, the woman tells them all.

  Katherine decides to check at the desk anyway. She can’t help herself.

  “It’s not like we can do much,” Jill says with a shrug. “Apparently we’ve lost touch with the rest of the world in such a lovely way we never bothered to pay attention to the winds that whisked around our embers last night.”

  “That sounds a little dirty,” Laura laughs, not caring that she’s twenty-third in line and looking at an evening on the terminal floor, a long night in an airport hotel, or hitchhiking to Seattle in time to make the last portion of the funeral and catch the plane out of Seattle and back to San Francisco.

  They wait.

  They wait as other airplanes fall out of the sky.

  They wait while they drink the dwindling supply of airport coffee.

  They wait while the terminal television screens blink “canceled.”

  They wait until there are no more planes moving from east to west or west to east and then cruising to the Minneapolis runway so that 50 or 60 or 170 more men, women, and children can be dumped into a building that may explode if one more airplane descends upon it and opens up its doors.

  Laura has cleared a spot for them. Their carry-on bags and Annie’s shoebox are under a huge window that is flanked by chairs, newspaper stands, and ever-increasing hordes of travelers who begin setting up their own camps. Within an hour, it looks as if the Minneapolis airport has become a refugee-holding center.

  They sit on the floor, place Annie in the middle, cross and uncross their red tennis shoes, wait out the tempest and observe the storm of humanity that has clustered near gate B-46.

  “We must look like we are sitting around a campfire at Girl Scout camp,” Jill says, as she stretches out her legs behind her, rests on her tummy and puts her chin on her elbows. “Who would think we’d get stranded in Minneapolis this time of the year in the middle of a traveling funeral?”

  “I bet there isn’t a contingency plan for this in Annie’s papers,” Marie says. “This probably doesn’t happen much if it isn’t the dead of winter.”

  “There’s that word again,” Balinda growls, rolling over to put her head on Jill’s rear end. “Dead. I’ve been thinking that I’ll have to take care of my mother’s funeral sooner or later. I’m not sure I’ll do this traveling funeral thing though, because I’ll have to go back to Poland to do it. That’s the only place that she loved, really loved.”

  “Why not?” Rebecca asks.

  “Why not?” Balinda responds. “What do you mean?”

  “If the place was important to your mother, if she grieved every day for it, why not take her ashes back there and have your own traveling funeral for her? Hell, I’ll go with you. Poland isn’t exactly on my must-see list, but then again why not? We’ll all go.”

  Everyone leans forward. They are thinking, “Poland.” They are also thinking how Balinda has woven herself into their lives and how, if they could, they would surely go to Poland or China or Ohio if they could help Balinda, Marie, Laura, or those cowboys from the bar in New Mexico.

  “My friend Gracie flew over Germany on her way to Bosnia several years ago,” Katherine begins. “She said once she got past the terrifying thought that she was flying into a war zone she started looking out the windows as they flew over Germany and she felt as if she were flying over Wisconsin. That’s why so many Germans and Poles settled in the Midwest. It looks just like their homeland. I suppose it would be kind of neat, Balinda, for you to go back and find all your cousins and great-aunts and to look into the face of your own past.”

  Imagining an international traveling funeral takes its own twists and turns as the six women joke about being stopped by border guards who want to sniff the ashes and make certain the girls are not smuggling drugs, questions about the matching shoes and bandanas and the funeral book which could be filled with code words for international espionage.

  “How are the Polish jails?” Laura asks. “Maybe you’d meet some handsome soldier, fall in love and—”

  “Love and funerals,” Balinda interrupts. “Not a good mix.”

  The women are suddenly joined in conversation by a man who is sitting so close to them Laura could knock his teeth out if she moved in the wrong direction at the correct speed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, bending at the waist to get even closer to them, “but it’s impossible not to hear what you are saying in these cozy quarters. May I say something?”

  He gets to speak following a unanimous vote by all the members of the traveling, and now stranded, funeral, mostly because he’s polite but also because Laura, Ms. Know-It-All, feels that he has something important to say. She’s looked past his eyes, she whispers to Rebecca, and can tell he’s got a bowl of knowledge that he’d like to pass around.

  He wedges himself in between Jill and Laura and tells them he’s an anthropologist who has done a ton of work surrounding death-and-dying issues. He’s mesmerized by the bits and pieces of information he’s picked up from the women’s conversation but he also has a story to tell.

  “Death, as most of you know, really gives new life to many relationships,” he begins. “Families reconcile, people forgive each other, they say things they have kept hidden or buried or were afraid to say when someone was alive. . . . It’s like something springs loose beyond the grief and sadness and those feelings of loss that make you want to die yourself,” Dr. David ReNould tells them, speaking with his hands as if he were giving a noon lecture.

  The women are focused on the professor and his lecture and they do not see that one and then two and five and then fifteen people have gathered to listen. The original circle, centered around Annie’s shoebox—which now has tattered edges and coffee stains and flowers drawn across its side—has grown so that it looks as if the women in the red shoes are holding court, preparing for a séance, ready to pounce.

  “There are remarkable stories that drift from generation to generation and that cross cultures, having to do with astounding instances of the living having experiences of connection and transformation at funerals and during the grieving period that are always explained by giving power back to the person who died,” he tells them, focusing in on his own words in a way that makes the women realize he has had personal as well as professional experience.

  “Tell us your story,” Jill, the professor, asks him. “You have something very personal to tell us.”

  David studies her and smiles. His smile says, She knows. She’s got it.

  “It’s a love story,” he answers. “I was in college and had already decided on my professional path. I had been dating a woman, who by the way was and is still named Ann, isn’t that one hell of a coincidence, and we broke up, mostly because I was an ass.”

  “Well, you are a man,” Rebecca interjects.

  Someone in the third row back says, “You go, girl,” and it’s the first time they all turn to look and see that their circle has spread like a rising tide into the chairs and past the end of the windows.

  Rebecca smiles, does a quick eye check with the other women to make certain what is happening is okay, and then nods as if to say “Thank you.” She smiles at David, blows him a kiss, and he continues.

  “Then my grandma died and Ann, who happened to be in town, phoned on a whim to say hi to my mother and discovered the funeral was the next day,” he said. “My mother mentioned to Ann that the weather was horrible and they anticipated a small turnout because she didn’t expect elderly people to come out in a storm,” he recalled. “When I found out that Ann had called I could not sleep. I was still very much in love with her and all night long I hoped that she would show up the next day.”

  He hoped, David said, so much that he waited in the parking lot of the funeral home until Ann’s car pulled in, and they were cordial to each other and she was one of ten peopl
e who showed up for the funeral and then he invited her to come back to the house where she ended up being stranded and they talked all night.

  There is a pause, when David shifts his weight and when the crowd pushes in, and Jill reaches over to pat the shoebox, and then he continues.

  “We’ve been married twenty-seven years, Ann and I, and there is not one person who knows us who doesn’t think that my grandmother had something to do with our getting back together,” he says. “Things happen at funerals. It’s some kind of cosmic, absolutely cosmic, spiritual process that helps maneuver fate and challenges the hearts and souls of people to step up for crissakes, step up and get on with it.”

  The crowd goes wild and people begin raising their hands as if they were in class. “Oh, oh . . .” some of them are shouting, softly, but they are shouting. There are suddenly funeral stories fanning out in the crowd three rows back, like a sail that has caught the wind and moves from top to bottom in a gentle push.

  “Let’s go,” the women all seem to say at once as they widen the circle, leave Annie in the center and listen. Katherine, the consummate leader, the funeral director, the one in charge, selects the speakers.

  Marie, who completely understands this rich connection between the dying and the living and then the dead and the living, sits back and listens in wonder. She listens with a small piece of her mind rotating back just a few days, before the funeral, and it makes her wonder while David speaks what else she has missed by feeling she needed to be so tied in place.

  There is a woman toward the back who rises when she speaks. She has on a dark blue business suit and she’s kicked off her shoes and undone her hair. Her story unfolds in a way that keeps everyone spellbound and she cries as she tells it. Her brother was killed in a car accident when she was fourteen years old. She said the tragedy devastated her parents so much that she ended up living with her aunt and uncle because her mother started drinking and her father left. She said from the time she was fourteen she attended a succession of funerals that were like stacked blocks that fell one after another after her brother died. Brother. Grandmother. Mother. Another grandmother and then her father. Funerals, she told them, became a part-time job.

  One day, the blue-suited businesswoman drove herself to the cemetery where it seemed as if her entire family filled half of the space, and was strolling from one gravesite to the next when she literally walked into a woman who was kneeling in front of another marker. The woman was grieving for her daughter, who died the same week as the woman’s brother. The two women talked, standing in the shadow of a mausoleum that was covered in ivy that scratched them as they leaned into it. They talked for five hours, exchanged phone numbers and then left.

  “She became the mother I always wanted and needed,” the woman, who finally identifies herself as Sally, shares with this crowd of strangers. “I moved in with her, she and her husband put me through college, and I owe them everything, everything.”

  The women sit up after Sally’s story and like the crowd around them, quickly become mesmerized by what is happening. Another woman from the group, which is still growing, rushes off to the concession stand and buys coffee, beer and water, and has her children deliver the drinks to everyone sitting in the circle that now stretches out into the walkway where no one is moving anyway.

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” Laura whispers into Jill’s ear. “What has Annie done now? Look around. This is totally amazing.”

  Jill looks around and sees a sea of faces hungry for more funeral stories. Hungry to listen and talk and funnel something—whatever they have been keeping in their own personal casket—back to life, back to now. Everyone needs some life food.

  David has hauled out a notebook and is busy taking down notes. He looks as if he has discovered gold. Jill winks at Katherine, who mouths “Oh my God” across the circle, and she and Jill turn to look at Balinda, Laura, Marie and Rebecca. They feign innocence but they all know that Annie’s funeral, their constant energy, the closed tarmac, and cosmic forces that have aligned to bring this fine group of travelers to their knees have helped to create this sacred and beautiful slice of time. Their smiles and nods encourage the storytellers; the courage of sharing rises like heat on a Miami Sunday.

  And thus the stories go on and on.

  I met my husband at my best friend’s father’s funeral. . . .

  When my girlfriend was killed in a car crash the year I was sixteen, my whole life came into focus. I became a minister and now when someone dies, when there is a loss, a hollowing out of that place, that deep long tunnel of sadness, I feel as if I can go back and help in a way I might never have been able to help if I had not experienced death and grief at such a young age. . . .

  My mother turned to me while we were sitting in the church just as my grandpa’s funeral was to begin and said, “You are adopted.” I was twelve and I looked at her as if she had just told me she was going to run off and join the circus. Why she picked that moment I will never know. Later, she helped me find my birth mother and we discovered that she had been at my grandpa’s funeral with her husband who knew him from work. She looked at me, knew instantly that I was the daughter her parents had made her give up in high school, and she followed us home and then waited. Funerals are something that I am never afraid of and my life was never the same after that day. . . .

  Sometimes, when I feel so lonely I could roll up and die myself, I pick up the newspaper and then I go to a funeral where there are very few survivors listed. I pray for the deceased and the living. It makes me feel good and I think it makes the other people who are there happy. . . .

  I know lots of people who have gone to funerals and met someone—a former girlfriend and they get back together—or someone from high school’s mom who was really nice to you and then you meet someone there. I did that. When my old coach died I went to the funeral parlor just before the service at church and his daughter came up to me, we were both married, but later when we were not married we got together because after the funeral I kept her phone number in my wallet. I guess I always loved her. . . .

  Someone else gets up to get more drinks and finally a well-dressed man at the edge of the crowd whispers to the man behind the bar at the concession stand and an entire drink cart is wheeled out and placed at the edge of the widening traveling funeral. It is like a private party that really isn’t private at all.

  Katherine turns to face every person who speaks and as she moves, her shoulder brushes against the box of ashes and reminds her why they are on the floor of the airport and where they have been and what is actually for real and true and happening at that very moment, and the nudge from the box feels like Annie’s hand on her shoulder and it makes her smile.

  It makes her smile and remember her frayed bra and the morning just two and a half weeks ago when she answered the door that now seems as if it was a year ago, a decade ago, something that happened before she was born. This thought passes through her mind when a little girl climbs on what Katherine presumes is her dad’s back and says: “If my mommy dies I’m not going to the funeral.”

  Everyone laughs but then a whole new discussion breaks loose. A discussion about the place where funerals are held and how we honor tradition, and why—with so many of our parents and friends and selves on pause and in a position to be ready for a personal funeral—it took Annie G. Freeman for so many people to see there are so many fine and glorious ways to honor the dead—yes—THE DEAD—such a horrible, terse and final word but it is what it is—outside of the curtained walls of a fine but remarkably dull funeral home.

  And Marie tells her story. She talks with such compassion about the months and days she spends with her ill patients and how she can see the lives of her patients flash like short films through their eyes. She talks about the importance of forgiveness and of letting go and for being a presence that does not intrude on a very important process.

  “It’s tiring,” she admits maybe for the first time out loud in a very long time. “It’s tirin
g and you have to be careful so that part of you does not die too.”

  There are a few more stories, really just two, from the crowd that has frozen itself to the Annie G. Freeman gate at the Minneapolis airport.

  One man who has a face that radiates kindness has been waiting to speak. He is sitting close to the circle on a chair, lined up to see the television screens and the sky where there is not one plane in sight. The women all guess him to be close to eighty years old and he has a habit of pushing his hair back from his face with his hands every few seconds, and then nudging his glasses up onto his nose when they slip down.

  “I’ve never told anyone this,” he begins slowly, “and I have no idea why I am about to tell you now except maybe it’s because you all seem so nice and we are stranded here and there’s no place to go.”

  He hesitates as if he is trying to decide at the last minute if he should move forward or stay right where he is and when he looks up in that moment of hesitation and sees a small sea, a tiny lake really, of asking eyes and hearts wondering what he could have to say to them about death and dying and funerals, he decides he has absolutely nothing to lose with this crowd of traveling funeral-goers.

  “Well, some might think this is silly, but my wife—my wife Pauline—she’s been dead for six years now and every single night I sit down in our living room, just like we used to sit down, and I have a glass of wine and an entire conversation with her just as if she was sitting there and we were talking.” He closes his eyes as he speaks so he can put himself right inside the living room. “Oh, we loved to do that. We loved to sit and have our wine and talk and share every night and I miss that so much and that is how I remember her and what we had.”

  There is a quiet moment and then the group claps softly, not loud, just the gentle tapping of fingers against the palms of hands slowly while the words “That’s lovely” and “How beautiful” parade from the floor to his ears.