I sat in a pew in the back corner of a dark, dank chapel. The setting was rather unimpressive and depressing. Of course I couldn’t blame my mom much; my death had been quite unexpected. There wasn’t money prepared for my early funeral, just a meager college fund. I was glad that she was even able to acquire this eyesore.

“I don’t really remember dying. I overheard the police officer tell my parents that it was instantaneous, that I hadn’t been in any pain. I knew at the very least that that was not true; I had been in tremendous pain for a very brief time. Then there was no pain anymore.

“The morgue was the first time I remember, for lack of a better term, becoming conscious; lucid if you will. I thought it was an out of body experience like I’d heard talk about. Seeing your life from the outside and all that.

“So that’s basically the gist of it, and now I’m here,” I explained to the little girl sitting next to me. She seemed unperturbed by the news I had just handed her. This was likely due to that fact that she could neither see nor hear me. I couldn’t decide whether she was listening to the minister or not. I wasn’t.

We were surrounded by a large group of people, many of whom I did not recognize. I noticed that only a handful of the people around me looked genuinely sad. The kids that were too young to understand looked oblivious. The kids that were old enough to understand also looked oblivious. Most of the adults dabbed at fake tears or smiled at the pastor’s attempts of humor. Did any of them actually miss me? Did any of them even care?

After what seemed like an inordinate amount of time the pastor finally called upon the speakers who would eulogize me.

My mother was the first to take the stage. She was a rail thin woman with shaky hands and unhealthy looking gray skin. I had not expected my funeral to arrive before hers but here we were. She appeared to have been crying but I wasn’t sure. My mother unfolded the paper, set it on the podium before her, cleared her throat, and then she began to speak. Her voice was as frail as the rest of her body but she pushed through.

I turned back to the little girl that was sitting beside me. She was clicking the toes of her shoes against each other and was sitting on her hands. She probably wouldn’t be so bored if she knew I was there, “My mother is a struggling alcoholic with a new drug problem every week. Hard to get any sympathy from me when she used all the money I ever made to supplement her habits.

“Not that I’m bitter or anything, she couldn’t help herself. For what it’s worth I think she really loved me, just had a funny way of showing it. I kind of wish I could tell her that I forgive her. I was always so angry with her all the time. I wonder if she knew, if she even understood.”

The speech was short and mildly incoherent. The sentences didn’t flow well with each other and sometimes seemed to be a random assortment of words. She was losing it, even more than she already had. I wondered when CPS would come for my brother. Someone here was probably worried enough for his safety.

She tried to tell stories from our past but she couldn’t remember them well enough. She would get to the end and trail off into nothingness. I might have cried if I could have. The others politely remained attentive throughout but I could see some worried glances between faces. I just wanted her to finish quickly and save herself some embarrassment, but she continued.
I smiled at the speech whenever it made sense and sometimes even when it didn’t. It was endearing and beautiful. At the end she recited a poem she’d written in high school. I hadn’t even realized that there was a creative side to my mother; I’d never thought to ask.
When my mother was finished she returned to her seat beside a gentleman that I didn’t recognize. I looked at the little girl next to me and she was sleeping.

The next speaker was my girlfriend, or I guess ex-girlfriend now. She was blond. Not ditsy blond, definitely sexy blond. That girl was hot, ridiculously so, but sadly that’s where the compliments stop. She was smart, I’ll also give her that, but she enjoyed flaunting her intelligence. I never understood her insults, just that they were insults, and they were normally targeted at me. She was rude, arrogant, demanding, and generally unpleasant. She wasn’t even funny.

“We’d been fighting a lot when I died,” I said softly to the sleeping girl, knowing I wouldn’t wake her no matter how hard I tried. She was a good listener, even in sleep, “I don’t know what we really fought about. I guess nothing in particular. That made it even worse. If we had something to fight about I would have been okay, but we just fought.

“I couldn’t even tell you who started the fights. I was pretty close to kicking her out and ending it a couple of times. I could never bring myself to do it though. Maybe it was that body, maybe I thought I needed her, I don’t know. We had a mutual agreement that we would tolerate each other. Neither of us was happy.

“At least now we don’t have to worry about fighting anymore, maybe we’ll both move on to better things. Yeah, I wouldn’t believe me either. I don’t see many better things in my near future. If I even have a near future. You’re pretty perceptive for a little girl.

“I think we stayed together because of an idea. We both believed in each other, or at least a version of each other. If we looked hard enough we could see it. Let’s see what she has to say.”

Her eulogy was much better than my mothers, at least on paper. I found myself laughing at the blatant lies that she poured out to the crowd. Tears streamed down her face in an acting display that deserved an Oscar. The words were eloquent and lovely but they made me sick. I couldn’t understand how she could lie like this at a funeral.

She talked about the first time we met and our first kiss. How she was just waiting for me to “pop the question” that both of us knew and accepted would never come. My ex enunciated how incredibly she had loved me when I kicked the bucket. She didn’t know how she could live without me. If I wasn’t already dead I would have asked the little girl to strangle me.
She never brought up how we had fought since the first day we had met. She didn’t say anything about her attempted overdose on sleeping pills. My ex basically romanticized our story and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had fooled even herself.

When she was finished she wiped the tears from her face and the pastor held her in a long hug. I couldn’t tell if he was comforting her or just being a pervert. I would have warned him that it wasn’t worth it but he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Her heels clicked all the way back to her seat and I couldn’t help but notice how vulnerable she looked. Even I wanted to make her feel better. I looked away and tried not to think about it.

The final speaker was my best friend from high school. He didn’t look sad, which I was glad to see. He was glancing at all the faces and wondering what I was wondering, who were all these people?

“I’ve known him all my life,” the little girl was awake again. Someone returning from the bathroom had walked into the pew by accident, probably drunk. It had been loud and uncomfortable, “If anyone will say anything worth listening to it’s him.

“We did everything together. I don’t really remember life before him. We were complete opposites, him and me. After high school I got a dead end job and he went to college. He was always a good kid and I was the bad kid. I remember one time we even had to run away from the cops. We almost got caught; he got his foot stuck in the railroad tracks. We ended up leaving behind his shoe. Man, his mom was furious.

“I got him in so much trouble over the years. He always brings…brought it up when he wanted something from me but I know he really appreciated it. I taught him how to live a little and he taught me the difference between fun and stupidity. There was a very fine line.

“I think I’ll miss him the most. This is the first time I’ve really not wanted to go. It’s funny; you think there is nothing for you in life until life is gone. I wonder if people who commit suicide feel like this. There’s so much more I could have done. So much more I could have lived.”

I fell silent and stared at my friend on the podium. He told stories and jokes and tried to lighten the mood and remember me as I was or something like that. His speech was good and I enjoyed reminiscing but he hadn’t written it for me, he wrote it for them. Which was fine, I wasn’t supposed to be here after all, I just wanted to talk to him one more time.

The little girl was becoming more impatient now and I watched her rather than listen to the rest of the speech. She had a lot more life to live. I wanted to tell her not to make my mistakes. I wanted to tell her to live and love and all the cliché things from movies and songs. Most of all I just wanted to know her name.

The pastor took his place again and told everyone that they could say their final goodbyes to my cold, hollow corpse. There was nothing over there, I was back here. That was alright though; I didn’t want to hear it anyway.

The mass of people rose from their seats, many of them stretched after the uncomfortable sitting period. The little girl jumped up and bounded to her parents’ side. I waved goodbye and she did not wave back.

The people formed lines and slowly made their way to pay their final respects. I remained seated and the man who had sat next to my mother didn’t move either. Once most of the crowd had found its way back to their seats the man stood and walked to my casket. His gait was not sad like the others had been. It was not uncaring; it was just weary, like he had done this far too many times.

I couldn’t decide whether he was an old man or a young man. He looked like both and neither.
When he had paid his respects he didn’t return to his former seat beside my mother. Instead he walked down the aisle, toward my pew. The pastor began talking again, even while the man was still walking. No one seemed to notice him, that or no one cared.

He dropped heavily beside me without even glancing in my direction. He listened to the pastor say a few more sentences before he looked directly at me. I knew that he could see me.

I understood then and looked at the tired eyes of the man. He opened his mouth and finally asked, “Are you ready?”