A Stranger Walks Into A Funeral
Reckoning with adult orphanhood, ghosts, and the stranger who spoke at my mom’s funeral as if she knew her
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Sometimes, death is sudden. It jumps out at you like a mugger in a dark alley. Blackout. The next thing you know, you’re awake, alive, at your mother’s funeral, in harsh daylight, and a stranger, a pretty young hippie woman coming down from a mushroom trip, is standing up, telling everyone a story about your mom that isn’t really about your mom because she’d never met your mom.
My mom’s funeral was not a somber affair. It was held in an arts venue, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a gallery opening, with wine and food and live jazz music. It was what she would’ve wanted, and I suspect it’s what many of us would want, given the choice. A chance to celebrate a life lived. An event. A moment. And in this spirit, my family and I decided we wanted an open mic so that anyone and everyone could share their memories and stories. Of course, we had failed to take into consideration that this meant that anyone and everyone could share their memories and stories.
That very morning, as this particular story went, my mother’s ghost had instructed this hippie woman, a friend of the arts venue owner, to knock on the front door of a local house and confront the owner of two vicious-looking dogs kept in a too-small pen. When the owner failed to see the error of his ways, this woman may or may not have set the dogs free, as per the instructions of my mother’s ghost.
Although this woman was open with the fact that she’d taken a hero’s dose of psilocybin the night before, it was unclear what was literary license and what was real, and it was disturbing to think that there could be some frightened, abused dogs roaming the streets at that very moment. Would they be hit by a car? Would someone pick them up? Would they meet their demise in a kill shelter?
But more importantly, I wondered, who was this otherworldly entity who’d guided her in this mission? It couldn’t have been my mom, who didn’t much care for brachycephalic breeds after having been bitten by one as a child. This woman’s story felt like some sort of Ouija board mixup, a crossed line, a botched connection. Eventually, someone — I think it was one of my uncles — moved the woman along, got her to sit down and shut up. The party raged on.
And raged it did because the more I thought about it, the more I fumed. How dare this stranger stand up and speak with authority about my mom’s ghost? My mom had been dead a week, and her ghost hadn’t told me, her only daughter, to do anything. Basically, I thought, growing increasingly irate, screw these stupid hippies with their stupid mushrooms, going around sharing their stupid stories as though anyone cares. The audacity. The nerve.
This sentiment clawed at me, ripping at an already gaping wound. Confrontation felt like the only cure. As things wound down, I cornered the woman, squared my shoulders, and asked her what the hell she’d been thinking. Standing up and speaking at a stranger’s funeral. Who even does that? Trembling, sweating, she attempted to explain herself. I pushed back — she was wrong, she should just admit it. She started to cry. I continued to rant. Eventually, she apologized, stopped fighting back, went verbally limp. I felt terrible, guilty, disgusting. I’d won, but to what end?
Next thing I knew, I was hugging her, this stupid, crying hippie stranger. I didn’t forgive her, but as her body melted into mine, we entered into some kind of a truce. And everything was still shitty. My mom was still dead.
In that year, 2016, both of my parents died, my dad seven months after my mom. When you’re still young-ish, telling people that your parents are dead is a statement that tends to suck the air out of the room. Lungs hold still, no one dares breathe, and you can see the questions flashing behind wide, uncomfortable eyes. The horror. The fear. The curiosity. They want to know what happened. Of course they do. You’d want to know too. Was it something gory or exciting? A murder? A murder-suicide? A fiery crash? A freak accident? A disease resulting in an arduous battle, ultimately lost? The walls close in, and you know they want to ask if you were there to witness it. If you were involved somehow. If you saw it coming.
But you didn’t. And it wasn’t exciting, and it wasn’t particularly interesting, and it was no one’s fault. There was no one to blame, really. No one to hate. It was sudden, both times. Medical incidents. They happened the way life does, the way death does, both slowly and quickly, and regardless of speed, unfolding in a way that doesn’t allow us to move back. There is only forward. Onward.
That’s what you would say, but usually, no one actually asks. Asking is bad manners. It’s digging up worms when all anyone wanted was a casual conversation, a coffee catch-up at Starbucks, an easy answer to an inquiry into this year’s Christmas plans.
Your role here is to make other people comfortable or at least manage their discomfort. This will be your role for the foreseeable future. You, the grieving child, playing the part of the in-control adult. You, the arms who hug them. “It’s okay,” you learn to say with conviction. “There, there. It’s fine. I’m fine. It was a long time ago.” And with each passing day, your lies inch closer to the truth.
No one wants the sad orphan. We demand the magical one, the orphan of myths and bedtime stories. Peter Pan, Romulus and Remus, The Boxcar Children, Snow White, Heidi, Harry Potter. Orphanhood as a backstory, as intrigue, as a quirky trait that imbues a life with greater purpose and meaning. The magical orphan is the protagonist, the hero. The story is always about them.
Literature, and particularly children’s literature, is brimming with orphans. This practice is more than a literary crutch — it’s an exercise for the budding imagination, a way to push boundaries without risk. When you’re a child, you want nothing more than to be granted the freedom to do whatever you want, untethered by your parents’ rules and judgments. But you also want the security of being able to run back to your parents when that freedom gets to be too much. So you turn the page. You close the book. You go downstairs for dinner.
People like to make things about them. We all do it. It’s natural, as we only really know what it’s like to be who we are. We can read, we can imagine, we can fantasize and empathize, but all we’re really doing in our earthly bodies is communing with ghosts. And then we stand up and talk about the ghosts as if we knew them. As if they belong to us.
When I was in middle school, I knew a girl, Maria, who hatched a plan to murder her parents. Her boyfriend, an older teen, had been secretly living outside her bedroom window, and together, they decided they would kill her mother and stepfather so that they could inherit their house and live happily ever after.
Maria was in my eighth-grade drama class. I never really warmed to her, but she was nice enough, and we spoke fairly regularly, though I can’t remember anything specific we ever talked about. Probably how much we didn’t like the drama teacher or what we’d watched on TV over the weekend. I knew she was troubled. When she didn’t show up for school for a while, I figured something bad had happened — she’d dropped out, or she’d gotten mixed up in something dodgy. I was both surprised and not at all surprised when I saw the story in the local newspaper.
One ordinary day as the unsuspecting stepfather mowed the lawn, Maria’s boyfriend charged him with a knife, stabbed him multiple times. That’s where their plan began and ended. The stepfather survived, the mother was physically unharmed, and the house remained in the adults’ possession. The boyfriend went to prison, and Maria landed in a juvenile detention center.
It’s an interesting story to tell, and I’ve told it a hundred times, but it isn’t about me. It never was. It has nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I knew the main character, or a teenage version of her, once upon a time.
There is a part of yourself that dies when someone you love dies. But if you tend to the patch, if you water it, if you let a little light in, something new will grow in its place.
Another girl I knew was murdered by her stepfather. She was in my Girl Scouts troop, which I’d quit a week or two before her disappearance. I wasn’t close with anyone in my troop, and I was growing bored of the sleepovers at the troop leader’s house, where we always ate barbecue or pizza and danced along to Richard Simmons's “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” videos in the living room. Surely there had to be other, more compelling ways to earn badges. Surely there had to be a better way to waste my youth.
When I heard the news, first that she’d gone missing and then that they’d found her body, I wrestled with the self-important implications of alternative history: maybe if I’d just befriended her… maybe if I hadn’t quit…
We take stories on and make them our own. That’s all life is: narratives connecting with other narratives, weaving a tapestry from disparate threads.
A couple of years after my mother’s death, I fell down a rabbit hole and spent an entire summer reading about psychedelics. Stupid hippies with their stupid mushrooms made their appearance in my life once again, but it turned out to be not so stupid after all. I devoured research. I watched videos on YouTube. I attended a conference. So much of it made so much sense.
Obviously, I can’t tell you everything, but what I will tell you is this: the things that enrage you, the things that leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, the things you are determined to run away from, these are usually the things you must run toward. These are the things that will save you. Life is not always a kind teacher, but she knows what she’s doing. She’s done it all before.
I have a tattoo on my arm, a line from a Leonard Cohen poem: Let them off the hook, help them off the hook, recognize the hook. I got it years ago when it meant one thing, but now I take it to mean something else. It means that we’re all tripping. We’re all stumbling into strangers’ funerals, setting dogs loose, creating chaos, spinning yarns, making everything in this big wide world about little old us.
Forgiveness is recognition. Forgiveness is looking into a mirror.
Like death, grief is sudden. It jumps out at you like a mugger in a dark alley. Unlike death, it doesn’t just happen once. It is an ongoing crime, and you are eternally the victim. Blackout. Again. Blackout. Again. And again and again and again, you blackout, you sink under, but in the spaces in between, in those desperate gasps for air, in the brief and beautiful moments of surfacing, you’re awake. You’re alive. You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive.
And so the orphan lives her life, and her orphanhood forms a part of her backstory, but it’s not the whole story. She comforts the people who need comforting. She confronts the people who need confronting. She tends to the patches and prays for growth. And when she’s ready, she stands up and takes the mic.
