Chapter 30, Funeral’s Resurrection Of Succubus And Last Gasps free porn video
My time with the Captain built more self-esteem than confessing to an angel for forgiveness. I told Gabriel there was nothing wrong with him. Now I told myself there was nothing wrong with me. The truth was different.
It was a memorial that caused another.
Who am I?
The funeral was for an acquaintance, a minor ghost from the past. She attended Notre Dame with me but never rode in my Desoto. She looked me up after she moved to the Pacific Northwest. Despite her Notre Dame diploma, her funeral was a secular service that lacked the propriety spiritual ambiance for the mystery of death found in a Catholic religious service, at least for me.
Reposed in her open coffin, lifelike, black coiffured hair, fingernails polished pearl white, hands holding a red bouquet, dressed in black and white, the impression was, she would rise up, smile and participate with us. Instead, she was dead, never to move again, a corpse, no longer among us, her body discomposing indecipherably as we watched. The lid, soon to be closed, she so neatly tucked into her coffin, it to be lowered into the damp earth, all to rot.
Oh God, poor Rickie, Mom, Dad what do they look like now?
We weren’t close when attending Norte Dame. The truth, I didn’t like her. She was proud, stuck up and only responded to a hello if in the mood, a corridor passerby ignored by other students as a snob. Years later, after she looked me up, we met over coffee in Seattle. She’d changed. She was bubbly to the point of felicity, no longer stuck up or arrogant. As we reminisced of school days, the café door jolted open, a customer walked in, she jerked her gaze to see who, her shoulder-length hair flitted in a flutter askew. I saw the hearing aid.
Her curiosity of who entered placated, her attention back to me, I spoke slowly in a soft but audible tone.
“You’re hard of hearing, are you not?”
She smiled, looked afar, waited for me to say more, confounded and finally replied.
“It’s okay. What do you think?
A few more verbal tests, as she fidgeted in ascending anxiety, her insecure replies and attempts to continue a conversation beyond heard grasp, confirmed she was bluffing. She was trying to be “normal” when not. She couldn’t hear me. It explained her proud, stuck up, school demeanor. She didn’t respond because she didn’t hear the hellos. Like at the café, she faked her way through school.
How difficult a life, such a terrible card dealt, not being in the conversation, isolated, no one understanding your deaf plight, instead traduced to classmate scorn, our scathing, clever epithet quips trailing her passage through corridors and classrooms. It reminded me again what is, is not what is.
How wrong to judge when we knew not who she was. The crude names we assigned her, hopefully at least not heard, as she passed among the student throng, a persona non-grata to the Desoto and slumber parties.
Then another revelation crept up, one about me. Would it have mattered? High school, it’s a time of sycophantic peer pressure. Any association with a pariah is a coup de grace expulsion from the “chosen”. Yes, I would have had empathy. But why? Because I was an outcast once too.
Driving the Desoto for girls' night out moved me to among the “chosen.” I loved my accepted status, the slumber parties and learning about makeup. My sin would be one of omission, silent sympathy while ignoring her plight, unwilling to relinquish the dive-in and slumber parties.
I’ve committed more sins of omission than commission. Don’t worry about what you do, it’s what you don’t you need to change.
With a louder than a normal voice, we became semi-friends of sorts, exchanged public personas but never knew one another close. In middle age, it was too late to connect intimately. My funeral attendance was a duty without tears except for my sins of omission. I prayed she could hear wherever she landed in the other world.
Did she have a secret puppet shadow? Who was she? I never knew her secrets, didn’t even know she was so deaf. Deaf and dumb, true. She was deaf and I, dumb.
During funerals for parents and those of their era, my mind dwelt on their life summaries, what they did and didn't do. For those younger, it was their tragedy, of a life story cut short, their uncompleted actions. This funeral was of my generation, now beginning to be sporadically called to the other world, a pace that would accelerate. As the sterile, macabre platitudes of the secular service droned on, my mind wandered afar.
Death, it’s final. Tomorrow the world goes on without her. She’ll soon be forgotten, yesterday’s newspaper. Death, the stop button on our life’s tape, a tape soon erased, a fading memory among those who knew her, probably knew her not, now an evaporating mirage.
I shifted to reminiscing about me.
Soon I’ll be in a coffin, never to move again. When young, I walked through the Mission Cemetery with Julie, my one St. Clare’s school friend, to her mother’s grave, awed. The cemetery, row after row, beneath our feet or in little stone houses, real people, with life sagas, stuck now, silently rotting away. They can’t move, they lived but are dead, their stories over.
We were careful to step around the grave edges; thought they’d know if we stepped on them. I stood before the graves, read the names, the dates, stared at the photos of the ones with a picture. They stared back. In my mind, I visualized them in coffins, rotten, horrible to look at, unlike their picture. What would they say if they could?
Mckenna
- 06.10.2022
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