Words on death and life

I am in the middle of an exhausting weekend out here on the other side of the country, helping to attend to my grandmother's funeral. It has been a bittersweet reunion with my family. On the one hand, I am seeing relatives whom I haven't seen in years in a rare all-family gathering, but on the other hand we are missing the physical presence of the woman who so gently knit us all together into a tapestry out of the various strands that are our lives.

We are a large family (my grandparents had more than half a dozen children, and then there are their spouses, the grandchildren, and even some spouses of grandchildren). We all crammed into the small apartment where my grandparents lived and participated in the raucously noisy ritual that is the Cantonese family gathering. Most family gatherings are pretty loud affairs no matter which culture, but there is something about the peculiar mix of the Cantonese dialect (which I think is almost designed to be bellowed out at or near the top of one's lungs), the cracking noises of pai-gow tiles being thrown around on the kitchen table, the constant cacophony of sizzling stir-fry, thumping meat cleavers and the blaring of a television playing a Hong Kong kung fu epic (with characters bellowing out Cantonese at the tops of THEIR lungs), that combine to make the Cantonese family gathering a particularly boisterous affair, even if it is for a somber occasion like a funeral. Getting my dad together with his brothers and father for a marathon session of pai-gow, laughing and taunting each other while losing alarming amounts of money to my 95-year old grandfather, I can see how they might have been when Grandmother was their age and they were a little younger than me, a trio of troublemakers.

We ate. Oh my goodness did we eat. I think that the overfeeding at Chinese family gatherings is a holdover from the time when famine was a constant threat. I think I've stuffed more calories, carbs, protein and fat into my body this weekend than I do in my average week at school. It's pretty ridiculous. My cousin, who helped to care for my grandmother (who had taken care of her for many years as a child), cooked enough food to last 20 people four days, all according to my grandmother's recipes...it was, I think, almost more of a therapy for her than it was about food for us. The post-funeral luncheon today was a traditional Chinese banquet with lobster, chicken, pork, fish, noodles, West Lake beef soup, etc. etc. And then to top it all off, there was a gigantic pizza fest tonight for dinner (another one of my cousins manages a pizzeria).

The funeral itself was a somber affair. Surprisingly, I find little that I can say about it. Grandma looked very much at peace. The grandchildren served as pallbearers and we carried her casket into the hearse to the crematorium. We had all insisted on going to the crematorium, but few of us were prepared to see it located right by a rough-and-tumble maintenance facility that stored groundskeeping equipment for the cemetery. The crematorium reminded me of nothing so much as a garage. The hearse backed up to the door and we helped to carry the casket the seven feet or so directly into the oven. We gathered in a semi-circle facing the oven and my uncle said a quick prayer. Then, the operator pressed a button and the heavy metal door was lowered into place with a loud mechanical whine. He asked my cousin if she wished to turn on the oven. My cousin, with a grim look on her face, hesitated, and then turned the knob that turned on the oven. There was a loud, heavy whirring noise of fans like a gigantic dishwasher, and that was it. Goodbye Grandma, we'll pick you up in a day. To me, it was a violent and ignominious end to what had been a respectful, dignified ceremony, but Grandma had insisted that she wasn't going to be left to be eaten by insects and rot in the ground and wanted to be cremated. Still, the whole process reminded me of a factory mill, the crematorium operator making marks on a temperature graph on the machine. It seemed ugly and impersonal, the tendrils of industrial alienation touching even the last moments of a person's physical presence on earth, the ancient sacred prayer adding a strangely discordant note to the tableau. When my time comes, I'd rather go quietly.

I was glad to return to the boisterousness of my family, the laughing, the crying, the arguing, the eating, the gambling, the remembering, the living...it was as stifling and yet as comforting as a womb, as unbearably thick and essential as a smoky wood fire. It's hard to think of Grandma being gone, but in the game of mah-jong that she used to dominate (beating even my grandfather on a regular basis), in the embarrassingly generous cornucopia of food that my cousin prepared, and in the love of this family, we don't need to think of her as gone. She's still here, we just have to learn to sense her in a different way.