Feeling: grieved
Listening to: --
Reading/Watching: Juno

Today, we buried my cousin.

Working at a high school choral competition on Saturday, I wasn't supposed to use my phone all day (contest regulations). When I went to the bathroom around 3:30, I sneaked my phone in, and it completely lit up with messages and voice mails, including one from BOTH of my parents.

That was when I got the news that my 26-year-old cousin hung himself. I came back into the contest staffing room to quietly ask to leave with composure and dignity, but the instant I opened my mouth I burst into tears. One of the other teachers had to drive me home.

48 hours later, I arrive at the funeral home for the viewing, and walk into the mass of family that waited there.

My family is hard to describe; you pretty much have to meet them. At celebrations they are silly, welcoming, and shameless. In hard times they are often preoccupied, tight-lipped, anxious. They're a strong bunch, particularly my mother and her sisters, and they have muscled through plenty of loss without a lot of wailing (tears, yes, but keening or dramatics, no). I was worried about exactly how stoic they'd be over something like this: my cousin like a wax doll in the casket, clean-shaven and scrubbed pale, so artificially peaceful when his last hours had to have been the complete opposite.

He was twenty-six years old, and everything felt inside out to be standing in large groups, hugging and talking, quietly laughing or crying, without him in the room somewhere, part of the pack. I had to remind myself that he wasn't working, he wasn't running late to this particular gathering; he was in the ground.

My cousin Marie is getting married this Saturday, and I am very excited about bringing Will to meet my dad's side of the horde. But I was a little rattled to have him meet my mom's side at such a time, when we're clouded with grief and shock and anger, rubbed raw with unanswered questions and painful discoveries. This is the first time anyone I was close to has successfully committed suicide. I pray it's also the last.

Today was obviously rough, although the sting was eased a bit by being close to family, and having Will at my side the entire time. The whole day he was there, hand on my back, quietly handling things like tissues and glasses of tea and talking the snippy motel manager out of charging us for late check-out.

There is much more to be said about him later. But today is about my cousin. Today is about family, and how fucking grateful I am that I have them all.

And how immeasurably angry I am that I have one less.

Comments? 0 so far...
Not a Diaryland member? Sign the Guestbook.