Quiet At The Wake - 1. Quiet At The Wake

Funerals aren’t supposed to be cheery, I know that. There was definitely not going to be any cake and ice cream situated at the foot of Uncle Andy’s grave pit. Still, the only other funeral I’d been to wasn’t nearly as dismal. I questioned why I even came for just a second.

My dad did make a bright comment that my cousin’s wife June was going to make her (apparently) famous potatoes for the wake. When I asked why we eat after a funeral, Dad gave me a sort of cloudy look, probably because this funeral was not for his side of the family. He looked to Mom for her to help him out, but she was hardly present. Her gaze was in another world, back in another time.

At least I had potatoes that I supposedly should look forward to.

I didn’t know Uncle Andy very well, so my presence was mostly out of obligation. I already had plans to visit this weekend, probably my last visit back home before finals. Uncle Andy’s unexpected passing was just a coincidence.

Usually during my visits, Dad would have a five minute “conversation” with me that would mostly consist of him grilling me on life after Brown, and Mom would feign interest before continuing her needlepoint, occasionally asking me for advice on how to navigate Facebook. Sifting through her feed of mostly out-of-touch and slightly-bigoted Minion memes certainly wasn’t how I enjoyed spending my weekends, but honestly, coming home at all was as equally out of obligation as it was for me to show up to Uncle Andy’s funeral.

Mom, this weekend, was wrecked. She kept looking at me in despair, like I was the next to go. I’d hate if I sounded judgemental to say this, but Mom was prone to histrionics more than the average person. However, this was Mom’s brother. If ever dramatic emotions were to be tolerated, now was the time.

Nevertheless, the sadness was deafening. I had no reason to make any noise, to breach the placid waters.

New England summers were inappropriately gorgeous for an occasion such as a funeral. Dad squinted up at the clear sky. A mild amount of irritation pinched his face.

“Wouldn’t rain be a little too on-the-nose?” I lightheartedly offered.

Dad’s gunmetal gray eyes flicked over. The mild irritation flared a little bit more intensely. “Not the time to make jokes,” he snipped, “Your uncle’s body’s still warm.”

I tightened my jaw. His voice had such expectation to it, like I was supposed to feel as dismal as the rest of the family. I didn’t know the guy.

I never reached out to Uncle Andy, but then again, neither did he. The risk of making too much familial noise I don’t think would have been worth it.

“Trent, oh, Trent!” a voice called out. Dad’s eyebrows immediately shot upwards, and then he turned a little too quickly on his heel. He found refuge inside as a vaguely familiar looking woman, who appeared a shade like Mom at a younger age, approached. This woman, however, lacked much of the upper-class polish of my mother. Her amber-brown hair was pinched back in a haphazard bun, accompanied by at least a dozen fly-aways. The lacy black dress hung slack on her body, as if she borrowed it from someone else at the last minute. Her slender hands flailed about, locking me into a hug I certainly wasn’t in the mood for.

“Um… hello?” I croaked as politely as I could.

Her grip tightened. “Oh this is nearly too much to bear!” the woman wailed. Jeez, her melodrama put Mom’s trigger-happy tears to shame.

“Right… um…” I stammered. I hoped that my mind would take over and fill in automatically how to address this woman, but I hadn’t any idea who she was.

The woman reeled back and looked me up and down. “It’s me, your Aunt Liv!” she declared, rolling her hand elegantly as she introduced herself. That explained the similarities with my mom; Aunt Liv was Mom’s step-sister. I’d met her exactly one time, somewhat recently when my cousin Felicity (somewhere on the “step” side) had her outdoor wedding. “No one in our family would dare do something so… bohemian,” Mom had hissed to me during the reception, well into her third glass of limoncello. “Then again, I suppose Felicity is adopted.”

Aunt Liv hardly had time to introduce herself during the whole day because she was aunt-of-the-bride-zilla; apparently, she nearly threw hands with a member of the band, I later heard.

“Hi, Aunt Liv,” I said with my best and most plastic smile. Right, it was starting to come back to me, now. She’d gone up to speak at the actual ceremony today, too. Honestly, my mind clocked out after Mom spoke.

I was so jealous Dad got away when he could.

She wiped away a tear, seemingly welled up in her eye for no reason, and moaned, “It’s such a shame. He was so young.”

“Uncle Andy?” I asked hesitantly.

“Yes! He was such a fun spirit when he’d come for Christmas,” she exclaimed.

A light turned on. That was new information. My Christmases were very sterile. Dad would give me a hundred dollar bill so crisp and new, I’d swore he’d ironed it moments before handing it to me. Mom would put on Christmas movies I’d enjoyed as a kid to promote some semblance of holiday warm-fuzzies, but it wasn’t like we were sitting down to watch them, wearing matching footie pajamas and sipping hot chocolate. Once I was out to college, especially, Christmas with Mom and Dad was exceptionally uneventful. I didn’t see any other members of my family, and so it was weird to hear that they were all hanging out together… without me.

Aunt Liv patted my chest and cooed, “You know I would have had you over at any point.” Her eyes poured compassion.

I took a step back. “Why do you say that?” and what was that supposed to mean?

I might have said it a bit too sharply, as Aunt Liv took a step back herself, confused. “I-I didn’t mean to offend…” she faltered.

“I didn’t know Uncle Andy,” I fumed. Mom and Dad just didn’t take me to see him, that was all. It shouldn’t have been any surprise he was closer with that part of the family, with Aunt Liv’s crowd. I don’t mean that to be judgy, either.

Through a shaded window, I could see Mom’s slender figure seated in a green parlor chair. She was talking to more people I didn’t recognize, nodding along to a conversation she surely wasn’t following if I knew her at all. I didn’t want to think about why I didn’t know my own mom’s brother. Aunt Liv was… Aunt Liv… they shared Grandpa’s DNA, sure, but Liv was born when Mom was like, eleven. That sort made sense why Mom didn’t make much of an effort for me to get familiar with her.

But, Andy was Mom’s younger brother. Grandma and Grandpa’s second kid. She’d literally known him since he was born.

I must have been staring at Mom a little too long, because Aunt Liv cleared her throat awkwardly. “...Has your mother told you much about him?”

I rubbed the back of my neck. God, my hand was drenched in cold sweat. “I gathered a bit. I met him when I was a kid,” I admitted.

When I was very young, maybe seven years old, Grandma died. Her funeral was a lot less dismal, because we all knew it was coming. Even me. She’d been slowly drifting away for as long as I knew her… I don’t think she ever quite knew who I was. Uncle Andy was there, and I remember my Mom walking up to him and immediately scolding him for what he was wearing.

Like today, everyone was wearing black at Grandma’s funeral. Except Uncle Andy. He wore a breezy linen shirt, the color of the ocean. The ginger curls on his chest peeked through, and he had a pair of sunglasses on his bald head, making him look like he was ready to set sail or head down to the beach. He and his sister had one of those “I’m trying to keep this fight at a polite volume but who are we kidding everyone can hear us” hissing matches.

Midway through their fight, he stopped short and then looked directly at me. His blue eyes bore holes through me. Visibly, he quaked in distress. I remember hearing his flowery voice cry out, “Is that my nephew?” but it wasn’t a shout of happy surprise, he sounded wounded, how someone would sound when they’d found out everyone in class was invited to someone’s birthday except for them.

Mom went beet red. Uncle Andy clamored over, allowing a smile to bleed onto his face, as if it weren’t obvious seconds earlier he’d been upset.

“Hey bud,” my uncle beamed, “I’m your Uncle Andy. I believe we’ve yet to meet.”

Something about his grin felt new to me. Mom’s smile, Dad’s smile… the way Uncle Andy smiled lacked my parents’s rehearsal. Also, he squatted down to my eyeline instead of standing over me like Mom and Dad did.

“My name’s Trent,” I introduced back, but my attention was already somewhere else. I was a little too young to really be in a mourning mood, so Mom let me bring my GameBoy to keep me busy.

Uncle Andy didn’t leave, though. He let the space between us breathe.

“Is that a GameBoy?” he asked.

“GameBoy Advance,” I corrected, keeping my eyes on the screen.

“Oh, well excuuuuse me,” he jovially apologized. “I have a friend— yeah, let’s say that— a friend who likes those sorts of video games, too.”

My eyes flicked up, catching his gaze for a second. “Does he play Pokemon?”

He rubbed the back of his neck and breathed, “I’m not sure. That sort of shi- um, stuff! That sort of stuff goes right over my head.”

“You sound like Mom,” I lied. Mom would say the same thing, as back then she was even more electronically-illiterate than she was now; However, she’d sound so dismissive about them. Meanwhile, my uncle somehow made it sound friendly and jubilant.

“Whoa there, I’m way cooler than your mom,” Uncle Andy laughed. It was strange how animated he was compared to his sister; his shoulders bounced when he chuckled.

He got a chuckle out of me, too.

Then Dad appeared from behind my uncle. “Hey, hey Andy!” he said with a cold smile. Uncle Andy immediately shot up and stood straight. Dad clasped his shoulder a little too briskly and stated, “Pretty sure your sister was looking for you.”

Uncle Andy blinked. He didn’t stop looking at me, though, with longing light in his eyes. At almost a whisper-tone, he warbled, “See you, Trent.”

“See you.”

That was the only memory of him I could conjure, really. Perhaps I’d seen him a few times after that in passing, but it became clear that my parents were intentionally keeping away from him when I was getting to my teenage years. No one could be “away on business” that many times. He worked in divorce law for Christ’s sake.

Aunt Liv drew out a long sigh, and at that same whispered volume as Uncle Andy so long ago, she imparted, “Your mom did tell me.”

My shoulders stiffened, and I feigned, “Tell you what?”

Despite my Aunt Liv not knowing me at all, she could somehow see right through me. Or perhaps I was just as bad of an actor as my middle school drama teacher said I was.

“Honey…” she breathed out, before stopping. She chose her words carefully, looking around at the various family members scattered about. “If you ever want to know more about who your uncle was, you just give me a call.”

I couldn’t unlock my jaw no matter how hard I tried. The grief must have been contagious, because for the first time today, I felt hurt. I wasn’t necessarily grieving for Andy but grieving for something I never had. Was that possible?

Aunt Liv began to make her way back to the wake, but I stammered out, “D-Did he know?”

My aunt glanced over her shoulder. Her bottom lip quivered and tentatively, she admitted, “I… yes. He did. I hope I don’t offend you, but I told him.”

So… Uncle Andy knew.

I had made so many mistakes, wading around and lost in a haze of parties and loneliness. And I was bound to make more. Some guidance would have been nice. I wanted to be mad that he hadn't reached out, but then again, I don’t think Mom or Dad would have taken too kindly to that. Dad probably would have been insulted, actually, that Uncle Andy would come in to make up for the role my own father couldn’t… wouldn’t… play.

A few hours earlier, when Mom was the first to speak about her brother, I admit I clung to her words for scraps about who this person was. Sunlight caught her face just so, illuminating half of it, the other shrouded in darkness. Her words, too, sounded like she was speaking in halves, like everything she said had a second meaning.

“You know, Andy was a strange man,” she began her speech. She brushed a thin strand of copper hair from her face and looked out at everyone in the family. “Most of you know that already, I’m sure. But we loved him anyway.”

I couldn’t place why those words struck me then, but now, exchanging a few words with Aunt Liv, I recalled those were the same words Mom used with me.

Months into my freshman year at Brown, I came home for spring break. Well, it was more like I was making a pit stop in White Plains before taking the train to get wasted with some friends in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of illusion surrounding adulthood, I’d later learn. You think because the law says you’re an adult once you turn eighteen, every decision you make is right. Adults make the right decisions. It was time to be an adult and tell them, tell them what probably took a little too long to figure out. I didn’t want to be some cliche like those other idiots; I wanted to be successful without chains.

The sun had set. I remember that so clearly because my parents were illuminated by the orange kitchen light. Shadows cast down their faces from the glow overhead. They simultaneously lowered when I told them I was gay, fully obscuring themselves in darkness.

But Mom said, “We love you anyway.”

“Anyway.” Who knew three syllables could be loaded with so much ammunition? I’d done something wrong, but they loved me despite it. It was just like when I got into Brown, but not MIT, Dad’s alma mater. Brown was a fine school, but it wasn’t the best. That wasn’t the plan.

“When we were children,” Mom uttered, continuing her eulogy, “He’d say ‘Lottie’— Lottie was my nickname— ‘Lottie, why are you always so uptight?’ and I’d say ‘It’s my job. ‘Cause I’m the big sister. I got to look out for you.’ But he always… he always did as he pleased, didn’t he?” Mom bowed her head as she asked the question, afraid to see the answer in anyone’s eyes.

“He just was Andy, no matter the consequence. The big sister in me never left, either, I suppose. Andy was so much fun while I… I hope that he wasn’t ever lonely despite how… different we were.”

After the funeral, and before the wake now going on around me, I remember feeling like I had an understanding of who Uncle Andy was because of Mom’s speech. At least who he was to Mom. I didn’t gain any sort of personal connection to him because of it, but I reasoned that was because he was just a distant family member I hardly knew.

I never questioned why I hardly knew him. I kept quiet. Now, I saw: I’d done so as not to stir up an answer from my parents that the back of my mind already had known. Now, I realized how little understanding I actually got from her eulogy. So many words blanketing a whole lot of nothing, or rather, a whole lot of things that she didn’t want to actually say.

I wanted to not care. I wanted to just look at the facts. He was gay. I was gay. So what? That didn’t mean anything more than people sharing the same eye color or both being right-handed; they were just traits we had in common. Not every gay man who walked down the street needed to be connected to me by some otherworldly thread of compassion.

At university, I was “out” about my sexuality, but I didn’t talk about it much. I didn’t need to. What was there to say, right? What was I missing— I already knew what I was. In fact, when the occasional gay student seemed to light up when they found out I was also gay, I was sort of uncomfortable; what the hell made me so intriguing once they knew my sexuality? It felt like I had to keep quiet for a whole new reason. I’d accepted that, I told myself, because silence was a skill I’d well-practiced by then.

I had willed myself to see only what swam on the surface— a simple box to check about who I’d rather take to bed— but just as I now heard everything Mom wouldn’t say in her eulogy, I could see all the potential of what I could have had, glimmers of a life I could have had lurking deep underwater.

“Aunt Liv,” I quivered. I was terrified to disturb the peace, to make a sound.

Her body softened. “Yes?”

“Do I have to wait to call you to hear more about him?”

Aunt Liv turned her face slightly, allowing sunlight to fully brighten her pale skin. I could see every part of her that she shared with Mom, but even more stark, I could see every part of her that she didn’t. With a mischievous flash in her eye, she hummed, “Let me tell you about the time I met his first boyfriend. I think his name was Pavel? Pavitr? Anyway, apparently they met in an acapella group—”

“Uncle Andy sang acapella?” I jeered.

“Of course! Oh my god, Trent, when your uncle sang ‘I Have Nothing,’ I’m serious, statues were brought to tears!”

Funerals aren’t supposed to be cheery, I know that, but damn, for the rest of the wake I couldn’t help but smile. And god, what a loud smile it was.