From up in the closed-off balcony of the funeral home that smelled like rotting wood and dust, Aunt Aggie sat watching the funeral. She had to sit at the back, in the shadows, so that Nick could not see her from the pulpit. Sid Ford stood by the balcony door, presumably to keep anyone from coming in and spotting Aunt Aggie, though Aggie felt sure he was mostly there to keep her under control, in case she got a notion to yell something down to the mourners. She had been here for hours, for they didn’t want her to take the chance of being seen coming or going.
She could see the congregation through a lattice railing, though they couldn’t see her. She could see the uniformed firemen designated as pall bearers sitting in the front row, and the others scattered around the room, wiping their own eyes. Someone from Celia’s church sang a hymn that Aunt Aggie couldn’t identify. She wondered if Jill had suggested it.
Mark Branning got up to say a few words, and Aunt Aggie leaned forward, listening hard. She didn’t want to miss a syllable.
Mark wiped his eyes as he reached the podium, and he was quiet for a moment, as if trying to find his voice. “We all at Midtown fire station loved Aunt Aggie,” he said. “She was one of the sweetest, most caring women we’ve ever known, and she was a heck of a cook.”
She heard some soft chuckles around the room, and she smiled.
“Aunt Aggie didn’t put up with much, but she was fiercely loyal to the people she loved. I respected that about her. I’m gonna miss her.” His voice broke. “There’s gonna be a huge void in this town. But I wanted to tell a few stories about the Aunt Aggie that I knew. Last summer, Aunt Aggie…”
She heard a commotion somewhere in the congregation beneath her, and Mark’s voice faded out. She fought the temptation to get up and lean over the balcony railing to have a look. Instead, she stood up in the shadows, straining to see. Several people were standing up, and she couldn’t see who they were hovering around. Someone was sick.
“Uh…excuse me.” Mark’s voice rippled with panic. “My wife…will someone call our doctor, please?”
Mark dashed from the podium, and Nick took his place. “Allie seems to be in labor,” Nick said. “We need to get her to the hospital.”
Aunt Aggie caught her breath. Allie Branning had the gall to go into labor during her funeral? Couldn’t she have waited just another hour? She wasn’t due for another month, after all. She pushed the resentment back down, then told herself that was ridiculous. When a baby was ready to be born, it was ready to be born. Couldn’t nobody stop it.
She saw Mark walking her out a side door, saw several people run out with them. Aunt Aggie sat back down, trying not to resent being upstaged.
After a few minutes, the crowd’s roar died down, and Nick took over. “Well, I guess Mark won’t be making those comments, after all. But I have some things to say. Aggie Gaston was a woman unlike any woman I’ve ever known,” Nick began. “Everyone in town called her Aunt Aggie, though only Celia Shepherd was related to her.”
Aunt Aggie smiled. It was brave how he’d mentioned Celia’s name, even though he knew a murmur would follow. And it did.
“Aunt Aggie was a giver. She was one of the kindest, gentlest, most giving people that I’ve ever known. Twice a day, she brought meals to the firefighters on duty at Midtown. Why? Because she thought they needed what she called ‘good eats.’ She led a long, prosperous, contented life,” he said.
She could see how carefully he was choosing his words. It was hard for a preacher to preach a funeral for someone who didn’t believe. She almost felt sorry for him. Too bad they couldn’t have had the sense to find an atheist to preach her funeral. Either an atheist or a liar, who could pretend they’d all see her again someday in heaven, if that’s what they wanted to hear. But she supposed that wasn’t done.
She wondered if this was gonna be one of those times when Nick was gonna look everybody in the eye and tell them what a pity it was that Aunt Aggie wasn’t going to heaven. Would her death become the launch point for a fire-and-brimstone sermon?
“I wish Aunt Aggie could have known the abundant life offered in Jesus Christ,” he said solemnly. “’Cause I think she would have been a glorious servant for the Lord. With her giving spirit, and her love for so many people, and the wisdom that came with her age, and her inner beauty—not to mention her outer beauty. I know that she could have made great strides in the kingdom of God.”
“There he goes,” she whispered to herself. The God stuff had to come sooner or later, she supposed.
“Her greatest sorrow in life,” he said, “was when her dear niece Celia was accused of attempting to kill her husband. But Aunt Aggie needn’t have worried,” Nick went on, “because Celia has the peace of the Lord. And even though she was sitting in a jail cell all alone, she had the joy of the Lord, because she was in tune with him, and he was speaking to her.
“When I first heard about all the stuff with Celia and Stan,” he said—as if he was talking to a room full of close friends—“I thought that it was possible that Celia was guilty. But then I went to see her, and I saw the Holy Spirit in her eyes, in her face, and I saw Jesus in her heart and in her attitude. I saw peace, the kind that someone who’s entered into a new level of spirituality can attest to. I saw a woman who knew God and, despite the circumstances, was trusting him.” He looked around at the other faces in the room. “I wish Aunt Aggie had trusted God, because he loved her dearly. I wish she had known how precious that love of God can be.” His voice broke, and he looked down at his notes. He was having trouble going on.
Aunt Aggie watched, captivated. Something in her heart deflated, and she wished she hadn’t come. Jill had been right. It was crazy. What had she expected? She had wanted grief…didn’t everybody want to know they were missed when they died? But she hadn’t quite expected the grief that had to do with her religious beliefs—or lack thereof. A heavy weight came over her, making her feel suddenly very, very old and very tired. The finality of this whole death business began to dawn on her, and she realized many of the tears being shed in the room were not because she was such a wonderful person, but because she didn’t believe in God. She thought of standing up and shouting out to everyone in the room that death hadn’t conquered her yet, and that it didn’t matter if she believed, that she was happy, and she was good, and she was a philanthropist and generous with everything she had, and that she met people’s needs when she saw them. What more did they want from a person?
But she didn’t. She sat quietly, as she had promised she would, because she wanted so much for Celia to be cleared. Still, she felt a tightness over her chest, and wondered if she died right here, right now, if they’d let this dismal funeral suffice. Was this all there was after a life well-lived?
She saw Celia sitting at the end of the family pew, being shunned by the rest of them. She couldn’t wait to give Celia’s parents a piece of her mind when she resurrected, tell them what she thought of them, coming to her funeral and acting all mournful, then treating her Celia like a leper.
Soon the funeral was over, and she realized that Nick hadn’t had much good news to offer the crowd on her behalf. He couldn’t tell them that they would see her again, because he didn’t know that they would. She thought it probably would have been nice for him to say anyway.
It was she who felt the worst, sitting here, viewing something that most people never had the chance to see. She wasn’t enjoying this like she thought she would. In fact, she was ready to go home, to try to wipe out of her mind all the things she had seen and heard here today. But she couldn’t leave. She had to sit through until the end, hear every word. It had been her choice, after all.
She glanced at Celia again and wished her little heart wasn’t breaking over some imaginary spiritual condition that Aunt Aggie had never understood. And then she thought of Celia that night when Aggie had been in jail, too, singing a hymn, telling her that things were going to be all right, as if she’d forgotten she’d been accused of trying to kill the man she loved most in the world. Aunt Aggie just couldn’t fathom it. Either Celia was stupid, or she had been brainwashed so deeply that every fiber of her own being believed in the things she said she believed. And suddenly, Aunt Aggie realized that it wasn’t with every fiber of her being that she believed there wasn’t a God. The idea of God was just something beyond her grasp, something she had never experienced before, something she thought was a bunch of hooey. For the first time, it occurred to her that these people, who were crying at her funeral because they thought they’d never see her again, might know something she didn’t know.
She wiped at a tear in her own eye, surprised that she would cry at her own funeral, when she’d expected to laugh her head off. She hoped Jill would come quickly to get her after the service. She didn’t know how much more of this she could take.
The funeral broke up, and in moments, Jill was in the balcony with her. “Aunt Aggie, the funeral director said there’s a van out on the side with blackened windows. He’s gonna be driving it, and you can sit in the back if you want to go to the burial site.”
She shook her head. “No, I think I’ve had enough.”
“Really?” Jill asked. “Well, I thought you’d want…”
“No, never mind. I’ll jes’ stay here and wait till you come back.”
“All right. It shouldn’t be that long. Just stay right here and don’t come out, and no one will see you. Sid is staying with you.”
Jill ran back out, and Aunt Aggie could hear below her as everyone filed out of the room, talking quietly, no doubt, about the tragedy of her death and the scandal of Celia’s plight. She stared down at that pulpit where Nick had done her eulogy. This was good experience, she told herself. As soon as she came back to life, she was going to write her own eulogy, maybe videotape it, so nobody would have to endure the likes of this again. Yes, it was a very good experience, she thought. She just wasn’t sure why it didn’t feel so good.