My head spins as a bright flash of white light flares up. I know this is no sedated sleep. That flash was the moment of my death. It was my crossing over. I’m certain of it. What the hell happened to my ripe old age prediction?
I’m strangely calm, relieved even at the fact that I’m still conscious and that the spiritual life I’d always believed in is true. I look around expecting to see heaven in all its glory or at the very least see the welcoming light of an angel greet me. Instead I’m shrouded in mist and completely alone in the pulsating vastness of space. I have no answers for what’s just happened, only memories which flick through my mind like an old cine film. Oh God. How fast it’s all been. The only thing I can be grateful for is that at least I’m standing again and breathing on my own. Looks like I finally got my miracle.
Someone whispers my name: ‘Lissa … Lissa …‘ the voice sighs and is joined by others until it grows into a chorus all calling out my name. A door of light opens to reveal my broken family huddled in mourning outside the cold stone entrance of St Martin’s Church.
People sometimes imagine with a macabre sense of glee what it’s like to be shown your funeral and let the pain of others feed their ego. The process bears nothing positive. Elsa, Nat and Mom stand pale and hunched like broken puppets next to a tearful Aunty Yvonne and Eunice. My earthly life is over. I’m an ex-human now, just like Monty Python’s cold, stuffed parrot. Sadness covers me as this truth hits home. My pain deepens as a distraught Karlos joins Nat and Elsa. His hair is unbrushed and he looks so uncomfortable in his black suit and tie. He’s even wearing black patent shoes which I know he’ll hate. His jaw is clenched and his eyes are red-rimmed. My spirit aches. Life is so unfair.
The hearse draws up. Six dovetailed men from the funeral parlour pace my mahogany coffin with its sprawl of red roses into the church. I glare at them. Why didn’t Karlos, Greg and Dave help with the carrying? Why do I have these anonymous, sombre penguins? The moment of watching my own funeral, knowing that in that polished box lies my own earthly body, is so surreal that I want to laugh out loud. Is this whole thing just an LSD hallucination; a mirage like the ribbons of water I thought I saw on that long Karoo road?
But as I look at my broken family I can’t deny the reality. Mom’s eyes are shrouded by dark glasses. She’s hunched and sheathed in black, her face pale against the high-necked black lace blouse and her knuckles cemented white around her crumpled white linen handkerchief. Eunice is a picture of pain in her green and white uniform of the Zionist church with her wide black armband proclaiming the brutal fact of my passing. Guilt eats into me at the pain I’ve caused and grows as I watch Nat break down in tears. She turns to Aunty Yvonne and clutches her with clawed fingers as the sobs wrack through her body. Aunty Yvonne envelops her in strong, fat arms and pats her loudly as if she’s winding a baby.
‘I can’t … believe … she’s … gone.’ Nat’s words spill out staccato-like between her sobs.
‘Agh, Natalie, I can’t either. Neither can your poor Mom. I just wish I could have helped. I just wish I had been here for you all.’
Nat pulls back and looks up at Aunty Yvonne with a tear-stained face. ‘It was so unexpected … we were taking her out to Hillcrest the next day … Dr Rajeet said she’d made good progress … I just don’t understand it … I really don’t.’
‘Neither do I,’ says Elsa, taking Nat’s hand. ‘Come, let’s get Mom inside.’
Greg stubs out his cigarette and signals for Dave to follow. They stand behind Elsa as she puts her arm around Mom and guides her in to the church. Eunice takes Mom’s free hand and gives it a squeeze. Dave ushers Nat and Yvonne inside, his face thin and wan. He’s a good guy and I’m glad Nat’s got him at home with her. Karlos watches them as they pass through the wide doorway but he remains standing alone at the end of the paved church path. Why hasn’t my family included him? He shouldn’t be left all on his own. Poor Karlos, he must be so hurt by it all. Can’t they see it’ll help them all if they pull together rather than push him away? He was part of me, no matter how brief that time.
Karlos looks at his watch and does up the button of his suit jacket before walking with slow steps and a downcast head into church. More people arrive: I see Thabo dressed in black with a black armband on his upper arm like Eunice. A sob of gratitude sighs out from me. I’m so touched he sees me as family. Another car arrives. I recognise Dr Pillay, Joshua, Amos and Mia from the lab. It feels like a lifetime ago that I worked there, even though it’s only a matter of months since I resigned. They walk into the church with serious faces. So, they’ve thought of me, but Mike obviously hasn’t. My spirit flinches. Bastard, after all the pain he caused me, he can’t even have the decency to come to my funeral. He obviously didn’t care for me at all.
A white Mercedes pulls up to the curb. A serious faced Dr Brink sits behind the wheel with a grim-faced Helen next to him. Nic and George are in the back seat. The door opens and Nic gets out. He’s wearing a smart, black pinstripe suit and a white shirt, looking like the lawyer he said he’d been in his previous life, but he’s lost weight. I flinch as I look at his eyes; they’re red raw with pain. He waits for George to exit and then makes his way into the stone church with hunched shoulders. George follows behind with shuffled steps, looking as miserable as I remember him. I hardly had anything to do with him so why is he even here? No sign of pink bitch Hattie or the Aryan Wolf, but no surprise there – they’re the last people I want to be here. I’m surprised at the pain on Nic’s face. Perhaps I’ve misjudged him? He’s a good-looking guy and a probably a player, but maybe he wasn’t stalking me and genuinely cared for me? He looks even worse than Karlos.
My mahogany coffin with its golden handles rests beneath the altar draped with red roses. The priest steps up to the pulpit and speaks in a sonorous voice about the resurrection and the life, and of how death is not the end. I hope my family take comfort from those words, but I wish it could have been Pastor Jorge taking my funeral, not this nameless priest who didn’t even know me. I’m flooded with an overwhelming desire to pass through the doorway and tell them I’m still here and that death is just an illusion, but of course I can’t.
The priest leads them in the singing of Psalm 23 followed by Amazing Grace before Dr Pillay goes up with slow steps to the front and tells of how efficient I was in the lab, what a good colleague and treasured employee I was, and extols my untapped potential. I smile at his kind words. He was a really good pathologist and a true gentleman. I remember Monica Moodley, his unrequited love: ‘Don’t pillay with me; I’m not in the moodley’, Mia and I used to joke when she rebuffed him again and again.
The church falls into a sombre silence until the priest gives the final blessing and my mourners file behind the slow-paced penguins and my coffin. The hearse leads them down to Red Hill cemetery, and I watch them drive through the red brick gates of the wide, tarred driveway. Cement tombstones with chipped angels and crosses are dotted around the green expanse like stone flowers. New graves with mounds of red earth line one of the boundary fences. I remember friends of ours who lived nearby telling us about the AK-47 bullets which cracked through the air during the ANC burials of the early 1990s. At least now, only four years later, things look peaceful. The procession winds along the drive like a heavily fed python. It stops near an open grave which lies like a wound in the red soil.
The penguins carry me with serious faces and set steps. They look like something out of Oliver Twist and for a second I want to giggle. What a job! They must spend their whole lives walking around with miserable faces, looking like they’ve just swallowed a hive of wasps, but my amusement quickly fades as I look at my family and friends just as miserable and their bodies hunched. Loss is such a hard thing to deal with and don’t I know it.
They stop a little way from the empty hole and wait while the robed priest moves, clutching his Bible, to the head of the grave. The poker-faced pallbearers hoist me onto the wide straps straddling the grave and begin to carefully lower me down. Nat, Elsa, Yvonne and Mom break into sobs as I disappear in my mahogany box, deep into the open arms of the damp earth. Dave stands stick straight, his arm tightly held around Nat to support her. Greg shifts from one foot to the other and bites his bottom lip as clods of damp earth drop down on my coffin.
Eunice ululates while the priest intones, ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.’ He sprinkles a light rain of red earth down onto my coffin. Nat helps Mom, her shoulders hunched and her eyes hidden by dark glasses, throw down a red rose. It lands like a spilt drop of blood on the top of my coffin. Mom moans and turns around to clutch at Nat, while Nat looks over at Elsa with pain-filled eyes. Elsa’s face grows grim and then crumples as she throws in her rose. Greg goes to put an arm around her but she stands immobile, staring down at me, while Nat, Yvonne and Eunice add their roses. The petals spread their crimson across the mahogany top for a few minutes until the soft, damp earth smothers them.
Karlos stands stoically to the side. He waits until they’ve finished before moving closer and picking up the bouquet of red roses which had sat proudly on my coffin in the church. He walks to the top end of my grave, kneels and places the bouquet on the soft earth. The rest of the funeral party stand, heads bowed, as the miserable penguins pile the earth over my coffin so that it becomes one with the red soil. I smile. Just as well I’m not really in it. I don’t think my claustrophobia could take it.
The last clod seals my grave and penguin-man pats the hump of earth smooth with the back of his shovel, taking care not to upset the roses. The finality of my earthly end shudders through the still afternoon air. My family stand in front of the newly covered grave with lowered heads. Nat lifts hers after a while and looks up for a brief second at the empty blue sky. I see her shoulders shudder and her deep sigh echoes through the surrounding silence. Elsa keeps her head lowered. She takes Mom’s limp hand and gives it a squeeze. Eunice and Yvonne stare down at the humped soil with Thabo behind them. My spirit aches. It’s such a painful last step, this ritual of closure. I remember the bullet holes in my own soul when we lost Dad. I had to take it one day at a time, wrapped in numbness, until one day the tide of sorrow was unleashed. I’m so sorry I’ve caused them so much pain.
‘Hamba kahle,’ says Eunice, showering the grave with another sprinkle of fine red earth. She gazes down with soulful eyes until Thabo pulls her away.
My family walk away with a mourner’s pace.
‘We’ll see you at your Mom’s house.’ Yvonne takes Mom’s arm and steers her towards the Land Rover.
Karlos turns to Nat and clears his throat. ‘I won’t come to the house … it’s too sad.’
‘Okay,’ Nat says, and she and Elsa watch him with narrow eyes as he makes his way to my Golf and drives off.
They walk towards Nat’s Honda.
‘What the hell’s this?’ says Nat as they reach the car. She snatches a small white piece of paper which is tucked under her wiper. She reads it and turns open-mouthed to Elsa. ‘This is weird …’
Elsa examines it with a frown. ‘Is it some kind of sick joke? She turns and looks around with fierce eyes at the now deserted cemetery.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Greg.
‘It’s a blank prescription from Dr Clark …’
Greg snatches the paper. ‘So?’
‘He was our childhood doctor. He’s dead.’ Elsa says.
‘He’s been dead seven years …’ Nat says.
‘It’s probably another doctor called Clark,’ interjects Greg, crumpling up the paper.
Elsa’s brow furrows. ‘It’s our Dr Clark’s address …’
‘Come on, enough, let’s go,’ says Greg, opening the back door and ushering Nat and Elsa in. He exchanges a look with Dave who quickly heads for the driver’s door and seconds later they speed out of the cemetery.
I feel a moth of unease flap through me as I look down at the crumpled piece of white paper lying on the path. What if it is our Dr Clark? Why’s there a blank prescription from him on Nat’s car?
The fluttering in my spirit grows in intensity. ‘Absent from the body, present with the Lord’ the Bible says. Mine was no normal crossing over. This is not how it’s meant to happen.