Numb

I remember feeling numb in the back seat of a car. I remember everybody hurrying, everybody with something to do. I remember being confused. Really the biggest emotions I remember feeling were the confusion and this static, this stuffy ringing in between my ears and behind my eyes. My hands tingled, but not like when they’re just waking up, covered in tiny knives—just more of this static, all the way down underneath my fingernails. The suit they had on me was too big, the shiny black shoes I could see my face in were new and the leather bit into my heel, it was hot, hot even for Memphis, and humid and stuffy in that back seat. Nobody would look at me, or listen, or pick me up and tell me it was okay. Nobody would even tell me what was happening.  I know that I had to have been outside sometime that day, or inside some chilly reception with a modest little table covered with a quaint little cloth cover and topped with a stack of unassuming plastic cups and a demure jug of water wet with condensation and a couple of timid little drops like tears, as if the water knew my late Grandma and had come to offer us a little comfort in our time of need. I don’t remember any of that.

 I don’t remember the parade of sagging faces, the nursing home queue all peering over the lid of the coffin, arthritic hands like vulture’s claws, perching on railings and walkers and shoulders and contemplating mostly who was going to be next. The faded saccharine stench of perfume and potpourri, the tang of Bengay or the earthy dirt-smell of vitamins and cup-a-soup. Leather palms, gathering life from the young and youthful, raspy and cold. Shuffling on respectfully selected carpet under feet too heavy now to lift up, oversized shoes that would send little boys like me into fits of giggles and a stern stare, all deafening in the hush that falls over a Protestant funeral out of Respect for the Dead.

I don’t remember standing in sunlight and humidity so thick you have to swim through it, so hot and bright you feel it coating your skin and making the top of your head itch but you can’t move. The Respect is paralyzing. There’s no place for swooning and pleading and ostentatious sorrow. Maybe if it wasn’t Grandma had died, if it was an accident or maybe if we weren’t Proud Protestants there’d be room for that, but not here. Where the black wool jackets scratch at our necks and long, appropriate black ties choke what little air we can gulp down out of us, where there’s not even muffled sobs to drown out the pastor droning about salvation and the Mortal Coil. I don’t remember when my leather shoes hurt so bad that I had to rock from the left foot to the right, squinting from the light gleaming off someone’s broach, or staring off at two squirrels fighting under a tree.

All I remember is the back seat of this big car with my family, everyone looking forward or down at their hands, this deafening static from my ears to my soaked socks, undershirt clinging to my arms and nobody looking at me nobody telling me what’s going on.