The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

The first viewing was today.

It was just as heart-wrenching as I expected. The thing I will remember most will be the snow—no, I’m lying, the thing I will remember most is that I missed Ulrich Schnauss’ only tour date in like four years.

I suppose I could’ve gone, but I was in no mood to go. The snow was coming down thick all day today—heavy mushy slushy flakes weighing down the sky. it took us an hour to get to the funeral home and an hour to get back, crunching along in the crushing traffic. Google Maps was peppered with accidents and traffic blockages. Streets that hadn’t been plowed were closed off with cones.

I assumed that he would be laid out in the same funeral parlor as my grandpa, but I didn’t realize that it would be the exact same room. The exact same chairs. The exact same casket.

We thought we would be the only ones there, because of the weather, but a few of my aunt’s friends showed up along with some relatives. It was the old lady cousin who has black teeth and smells like she hasn’t bathed since the Reagan administration accompanied by her comparatively well-put-together husband.

My cousin Patty took it terribly hard, she came in after her own chemo appointment because she thought she’d be too weak to attend the funeral. She has some cancerous cells in her lung. She was absolutely inconsolable for about ten minutes—her despair was so palpable she could have been sobbing into a megaphone.

This whole experience—I have no idea how to process it. I think I understand why a Albert Camus chose a funeral for the beginning of The Stranger. It touches on the most primal aspect of our existence, that of life and death. To see my uncle there all made up like he was going out on a date—it seemed a tragic monument to the absurd.

One of my strange old lady cousins was going around assuring everyone at the funeral home that we would see my uncle again. I felt like I had crossed over onto the other side of reality. Did she really believe this tripe? Does anyone? The funny thing is, if there was some type of afterlife James would be just as self-centered as he always was: ignoring us to talk to strangers, never paying when we went out to eat, letting forth a gale-force wind of bullshit at all times. That’s what I’m going to remember, but it didn’t make the scene any less tragic.

I remember a few months ago my mom told me that she wasn’t as much mourning for her brother (who did unforgivable, heartless things to her when she took care of him) but for the brother that she could have had. I think that’s pretty much the lens through which I’m seeing this entire situation. It’s funny—it was actually relatively easy to get to my uncle’s place when I lived in Sacramento. He could have been a great force in my life—I mean, for fuck’s sake, he was my godfather—but instead he lived a life with strangers. I have his doctoral thesis sitting here in a bound, typewritten copy. I want to typeset it and have it published in a nice binding. I’m sure he’d like that.

I’m not sure what I have left of him, save for some random things I inherited when we cleaned out his house. A pair of cufflinks, some ill-fitting sport jackets, his Rorschach and TAT cards.

What does a life leave behind? There are some numbers in a bank account, I’m sure. All of his fake California friends who probably still don’t even know that he’s passed on. The part of our family that we don’t talk to even sent a gigantic bouquet.

I think the most tragic part of all of it is that he never understood how much everyone around him loved him. He never married—and I can’t help but think how I would feel if I never had anyone that meant anything to me after what, nearly sixty years? He had a long-time girlfriend, Joni was her name. She wouldn’t even return his calls after he got sick.

I’m not sure what he ever wanted out of life, but whatever it was, he sure did get it. He had enough money to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted. I just can’t help but feel that I never really knew him.