Soliloquies Anthology 25.2

sister as she cries and holds my hand. I can see my mother crying. I know everybody that goes up to speak. I laugh and nod my head along to the stories. I stand and sing along to the hymns. We drop roses on his casket and watch as he plummets into the ground.

We gather in the church hall for some food. On the screen, they’re playing old family videos. The food wasn’t that great, and the rum cake had a little too much rum, but we gossiped about my cousin’s then-fiancé—my minister uncle didn’t “approve” of her—which was fun. And of course, we took a photo.

The day after the funeral, my mom and I sat in the living room, on separate couches. It was a rare moment in my house, when it was quiet.

“You seem to be handling this really well,” my mom said.

That was true. I was. “I guess I am.”

“You didn’t cry at the funeral.”

“I don’t like funerals. I know why we have them, but it’s just—they’re very weird,” I responded, even if it had no correlation to what she’d said, I still said it. “I think I came to terms with it before it even happened.”

“I understand what you mean.”

“He was suffering, and now he’s not. That’s how I look at it.” And it’s a relief, I think in my head. But it feels like the wrong time to say it, to think it at all, but I couldn’t help it.

Maybe that makes me a terrible person. But it was. It was a relief.

I know many people feel a sense of relief when a loved one who was suffering dies. Rationally, I knew this.