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I just got back from a funeral. Don't worry about anguish or anything, it's a step-uncle. He drove a motorcycle, smoked like a stack, and had very yellow teeth and greasy hair. He kinda scared me when I was littler.

It was startling, because not everyone who came to the funeral necessarily had much nice to say about him. He was one of those difficult geniuses. After his wife died he gave up on making sense to people and practically became a hermit, living oddly in a New York apartment. His stepmom and stepsisters hadn't seen him in three years when word reached us last summer that he had died.

It was one of those New York deaths. Untimely. Unpretty. So they cremated him, sent the ashes to his hometown of Port Arthur, and held off on a service until a time when all the sisters could get together. The whole thing feels very morbid to discuss.

In short, I went with my mom because she didn't want to go alone and I hoped to see my PA cousins, Erin, Mandy, Sarah. I adore them. But we knocked at their door three times and called and left messages but they weren't there. They're practically nocturnal, but I was hoping to wake Erin up and have her come with us, so I could have someone under forty to talk with.

Somehow, for a man that even his family didn't like much most of the time, there was a gathering of eighteen or twenty people, some there to support the sisters, some there because they "knew him and liked him" and hey, not much interesting happens in Port Arthur. None of his sisters even had anything to say in the eulogy.

And even though I believe in respecting the dead and upholding the good things he did with his life (he did some work on the first nuclear weapon, that's how intelligent he was), but I pray to God my funeral isn't like that, awkward and somehow empty... the graves were all decorated with silk flowers, the stones tilted awkwardly from settling earth... it was one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.

One of my mom's cousins was there, not a blond hair out of place, lipstick perfectly applied, flawless cream skirt-and-blazer set. She made everyone else look small-town, frumpy, rumpled. But she never took her sunglasses off, even inside in the service. Her smile was the most small-town thing I have ever seen- they coulda made a dozen silk flowers out of it, it was so fake.

I looked at my mom, who needs a haircut, is finally letting her gray shine through the dark brown (something about the 48th birthday...), has deep laugh lines around her eyes, that slightly flushed look she has in windy weather, the apples of her cheeks pinkened like a little girl's, just like me. Rumpled. But she earned every line in her face, and her hugs have always been warm pillows.

Her eldest full brother, David, died at fifteen in a motorcycle accident. Truck. No helmet. Brain damage. I never knew him. Her youngest brother, Paul, who was quiet, shy, and six-foot-nine, died when I was ten. He was thirty-seven. Flu. Mom never let us go without a flu shot ever again.

This was her last brother.

But the women in her family are unbelievably strong. They've buried or divorced nearly every man they come across, with the exception of current husbands. And they still sang "America the Beautiful" in four-part harmony as Uncle Skip's ashes were buried in the October mud next to his wife and father.

I don't think she understood when I hugged her tight and wouldn't let go, before we climbed in the car to go home. But she accepted the hug and hugged me back just as tightly.

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