In a sense you could say I’ve already been to my own funeral.
It all started when our friend Rob died.
I was in my second year of college; Tim was about to graduate. Rob was in the grade between us during elementary and high school, a mutual snow-fort builder, Woods-player, rule-follower.
We found out he was dying when we were home on break. Tim and I were feeling restless a few days after Christmas, and we decided to make the snowy trek across town to the small house Rob had rented when he’d dropped out of college the year before when his mom died.
We showed up as the sun was setting behind his house. It was a half-cloudy day, and the sky was streaked with orange and topaz. His street was full of mature trees, their leaves gone months ago. The air smelled cold, even though the sun had been warm earlier. I looked up at the brilliant sunset as Tim pressed the bell, so I wasn’t looking ahead as the door opened.
“Hey, guys,” Rob said, a mixture of surprise and fear in his voice.
My head snapped down and I took a step back before I could help myself. Rob was standing in the doorway, but I barely recognized him. He was thirty pounds thinner, had black rims around his eyes, and a yellow tinge to his skin.
It was pancreatic cancer, he told us when we were seated in his gloomy living room, untouched beers in our hands. He’d taken a leave of absence from work when he got the diagnosis and, as far as I could tell, had holed up in this fourteen-by-fourteen-foot room since then. A film of dust coated everything, even him, it seemed.
The cancer was terminal. He was, for lack of a better phrase, waiting in that room to die. He didn’t say the words—he didn’t have to. The pills on the coffee table, the makeshift bed on the couch, the pile of DVDs of all his favourite movies stacked up like a Jenga game next to the TV all spoke for him.
What they couldn’t say was why he’d kept it to himself. How he could have kept it from us all this time. He never knew his dad, and with his mom gone, we were, for all intents and purposes, his family.
I asked, once, but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. He kept on washing the dishes in the sink, slowly, rhythmically, and just changed the topic.
We spent the rest of the holiday with him. We took him on a slow walk around the block, filled his fridge and freezer with prepared food, and bought him a dozen more DVDs. I taped my numbers on a piece of paper near the phone and wrote “In case of emergency” above them. Rob saw me do it, shook his head slightly, but didn’t say anything. We talked sporadically, letting him set the pace, and when it was time to go back to school, we hugged goodbye, something we rarely did. His bones felt like a bird’s against me, so fragile, and my brain shivered.
He died six weeks later. Tim and I both spoke at the service, telling funny stories, trying to keep it light. What else do you do when a twenty-one-year-old dies? You say he lived his life to the fullest, whether he did or not, that you were sure he had no regrets, no things left undone.
But, of course, everyone has regrets. Loose ends. Things they could do if they had more time.
Everyone does.
Afterwards, we gathered in the church basement, a depressing room with ceilings so low anyone approaching six feet had to stoop. The adrenaline began to drop, reality began to hit, and I’m sure I would have lost it completely if Tim hadn’t chosen that moment to put his hand on my shoulder and suggest we get out of there.
I agreed readily, and we moved to a dingy bar down the street with a group of our childhood friends. I remember an old jukebox, a bar-food menu, the smell of half-rotted oats and cheap detergent. We ordered pitchers of beer—a local brew that’s thick and strong—and we continued on, telling every story we could remember about Rob, even the ones whose endings had been consumed by alcohol molecules or time.
When the stories petered out, Tim said how much it sucked that Rob wasn’t there. That he couldn’t hear how much he meant to us, what a hole he left behind. “People shouldn’t have to be dead for them to hear that shit,” he said, his words slurring, though that didn’t blunt the ring of truth.
The idea was born from this. We should have a funeral for all of us, one we could attend. It would be a celebration of our life till then that wasn’t tinged with anything other than love, brother, love.
Maybe it was because we’d reached the I-love-you-man part of the evening, but we agreed to a date there and then. A date we kept, six months later.
Our families thought we were crazy, but we didn’t care. We were doing this for Rob. We were doing this for us. We were doing it.
Despite people’s doubts, the town hall was packed and, pretty soon, laughter clung to the rafters. Each of us took a turn speaking of the other; the good, the bad, the funny. Tim even put together a slideshow and set it to schmaltzy music. I’m sure he was doing it to be ironic, but halfway through Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we were all wiping tears away.
Afterwards, we swore we’d do it again in five years, and every five years after that. To remember Rob, but also to remember us.
It never happened. Life became too complicated, too busy.
But because of the pre-funeral, I know a few things you don’t usually know.
The last person to speak about me will be Tim. There will be laughter, a few tears. He’ll have a slideshow full of embarrassing shots of me as a child in a series of unfortunate outfits. He’ll remind everyone of the time I almost set the house on fire, how I’d succeeded in running the school mascot’s uniform up our high school’s flagpole, how I still thought I might make the PGA one day, or at least the Senior Tour. Then he’ll signal to someone and they’ll click to the next slide, and there I’ll be. My face projected through a bright stream of light, smiling, laughing, Rob and our friend Kevin on either side of me, gussied up in tuxedos for prom, awkwardly holding the corsages we’d bought for our dates.
Oh, God, we were young.