A YouTube Funeral

And a Monday at home with two small children

Yesterday morning, I attended my first virtual funeral. My children watched Dragons: Rescue Riders in the living room while I squirreled myself away in the bedroom with my laptop. I could hear them giggling from time to time. It’s not that I didn’t want them to see me sad — but I wanted the luxury of not having to explain my sadness.

He was my neighbor growing up. Several years younger than me, brimming with energy, somehow notably innocent yet always in possession of multiple CDs with the “explicit lyrics” warning on them. I used to get paid five bucks to pick him up after school, feed him a snack, and watch him jump on the bed or shoot baskets in our shared driveway until his mom got home. It was a cushy job. Most of my four brothers and sisters babysat him too, at one time or another. Our most beloved, oft-repeated lore about him was that he referred to the main character of a movie by the title of said film, rather than by their name. As in, “And then, Home Alone tied a catapult to a frying pan and it smashed the robbers up!” or “Get ‘em, Die Hard!” I don’t know to this day if this was really true or just a shared false memory, like siblings are prone to creating.

He died this month of a heart attack. He was just on the other side of 30. For many years I watched his parents, the sweetest of people, with an equally sweet child, struggle to help their son navigate an often difficult life. It was incredibly painful to hear about, even thirdhand. He had recently decided to come home after years spent on the other side of the country, to return to school, to begin again in the home where he’d first started his life. That will not happen now.

Through a livestream, with several anonymous others, I watched four burly boys in knit caps lower his casket into a hole in the ground. Only those of us on screens seemed to be privy to this process. After prayers and readings, the mourners were invited to come up, one at a time, and throw a handful of dirt down into the hole. His parents went first. I cannot find words to describe this part. I watched my own mother take a turn, her usually airy face awash with grief. One woman sprinkled the dirt like salt. Another childhood friend, who lost his mother when he was very young, squatted down sturdily to scoop and deposit a large palmful, then returned to his post by an obelisk. It felt like the dirt pile was not diminishing, and it was both impossible to witness and impossible to look away.

When the service was over and the crowd had mostly dispersed, the audio operator and the cameraman began to chat quietly, perhaps assuming that most of us had signed off. One admitted to the other that this was, surprisingly, his first funeral. “My dad died last month” he added, “but I couldn’t go to Texas.” They spoke about the awful sound of dirt hitting a casket, about how in Ireland, they cover the casket with purple cloth and straw to muffle it. The camera zoomed in on the last three people loitering by the hearse, then back out, until the winter sun washed out the picture and it went black. 

Afterwards, I loaded my kids in the car and drove three blocks to get hot cocoa. My son complained the whole time about one thing or another — the cold (it was cold for Oakland), whether it was his turn to look for an “I Spy,” the infuriating way his sister ate her Cheddar Bunnies. When he could not take it anymore, he threw his cup of hot cocoa on the floor of our car and told me how terrible I was. Warm, brown liquid covered everything in sight. I said something I now regret, got out of the car, screamed to the sky and banged my fists silently on the hood. I heard the words of a beloved parenting coach in my head: “Every bad behavior is an attempt to achieve belonging and significance.” It is very tiring, some days, to make sure others feel significant.

Back at home, my kids bounced on yoga balls down a track we’d forged through the kitchen, while I commented on their various successes and snafus in my best Jeff Van Gundy voice. “It appears that the blue rider’s pants have fallen down, exposing his bottom, but that has not deterred him in the slightest! Now the pink rider appears to have disembarked her ball and laid down in the middle of the track, meowing. This is unprecedented. And it looks like, against all odds, they both win!”

How, I wonder, is all of this parenting? The home-spun races. The conniption fit over a small mess. The watching your child suffer. The watching your child present his bare ass to you and smile naughtily. The intervening too much, too little, who the hell knows. The being in Texas, or California, or wherever your child is not. The being in the same small apartment together every single day, month after month. The handfuls of dirt. The leaving too soon or not soon enough to miss living through their departure.

In loving memory of Alexander “Zandy” Bard. Thank you for letting me practice.