Bucket List - Speak at a funeral

 

The Bucket List is a list of things I want to do/feel I should do before I die.  I've done some of them already, and I'm telling one of those stories here.  To see the whole list, click here.

I was a lucky child.  I grew up in the same house from birth till I was over 21 years old.  My early life was incredibly stable, safe and happy.

I lived in a nice, middle class, suburban neighborhood, and we had a little local gang of kinds, kind of like Charlie Brown and his friends in Peanuts.

From very early on, I was friends with Ellen.  We met when I went to crèche/nursery school at 3 years old.  

I stayed the night at her house more times than I can count.  When we were tiny, I would bathe with her and her brother and sister, all of us fitting into the bath at the same time.  

Her parents were like a close uncle and aunt.  My brother and sisters were so much older than me that Ellen's sister and brother felt like my little siblings.  Her house was my surrogate home.

As we grew older, we were all at her house every day in the summer, because she had a pool.  We played Marco Polo in earlier years, and slathered ourselves in baby oil to get tanned when we were teenagers.  We rode our bikes, we played hide and seek, we went to the movies, we hung out at the mall.

She didn't always see me as her BFF, but I saw her as mine.  At my 21st birthday, Ellen stood up and shocked me by apologizing to me for sometimes having been cruel to me.  I didn't know what to say.  She was 90% friend and only 10% bitch, but little girls are like that... we can be horrid to each other.  I have no doubt that I was awful to her too at times.  

Then we went to different Universities, I left to travel in the UK and Europe, and we grew apart a little.  I didn't like her boyfriend when I met him, but then again, I was always insanely jealous of anyone who took her attention away from me.  

I came home after a year in England to attend her wedding.  She was moving to another country and going to live on a farm with that same guy I didn't like.  This was the exact opposite of the plans that I had for myself, and I didn't agree with her choices, but I was happy that she was happy.

I know her wedding was lovely even though my recollection of it is hazy.  I wish I remembered it better.

Sadly, it is overshadowed by the memory of her funeral, which took place a few weeks later.  I had come home for a short stay, arriving just before her wedding.  As it turned out, I was going to be there long enough to pay my respects to her in person.

A few days after her honeymoon ended, she died in a car accident.

My mother, who also saw her as a daughter, called me, crying, to tell me the news.  I remember it so clearly.  I was visiting friends in another town, I was sitting in the bath, someone brought me the cordless phone, and I just didn't believe my mother.  

"You're joking!" I kept screeching at her.

I can't imagine how hard it must have been for her to make that phone call.

And so, suddenly, I had a funeral to attend.

Ellen was the first child, and her mother's favorite.  Seeing my second mom at the funeral, this lovely woman, in such pain, was one of the hardest things I have ever seen.  I have a mini-video snapshot in my memory of her walking to the front to put a photo of Ellen on a stand, her husband trying to steer her into a pew, and her brushing his hand away, going up there to put the photo up for all to see the beauty that was taken from us.  From that day on, Ellen's mother - previously the light of every party, tanned, fit, well groomed - aged.

I can't remember if I offered to speak, or if they asked me.  I thought long and hard about what to say.  I thought about reading a poem, I thought about talking about our childhood, I thought about saying all the nice things I could remember about Ellen.

But all that seemed like such clichéd bullshit.

And so I stood up and I told the truth.

I don't remember the whole speech.  But I remember saying:

"I don't know how you feel, but I'm angry!"

I think I went on to say that it wasn't fair, that she had her life in front of her and that she was one of the kindest and sweetest people I knew.

It was true. 

Ellen never smoked or drank too much or misbehaved like I did.  She was a really wholesome girl, pretty, sporty, fun and open-hearted.

I also said that she wasn't perfect.  But I didn't give the examples of her sister getting slapped all the time when we were kids for trying to hang around with us.  Or that she hated staying over at my house and always made me go to hers for the night.  Or even that she was the queen, the leader, the controller of any game we played.

I said that, in spite of not being perfect, she was one of the good ones, and she didn't deserve to die.

Because she didn't, for fuck's sake!

When this happened, Ellen and I were 26 years old.