Bleh.

I had therapy today, hallelujah. It’s been two weeks since my aunt’s unexpected death, and I’m only today beginning to work through the tragedy of it as anything other than a surreal story to tell. I spent the four days in Tennessee feeling like I’d been hurled into a movie – something by P. T. Anderson, where the characters stumble around doing bizarre, inexplicable things, and no one reacts to the bizarreness; they just keep going as if everything is perfectly normal – and only in retelling everything to my therapist have I begun to feel in any way connected to the strange events of the week.

I am convinced we – by whom I mean Christians – do funerals all wrong. Sara’s funeral was a very Southern Baptist affair, delivered by an old-fangled Southern preacher who talked about the tragedy of my aunt’s death, yes, but mostly spent the time talking about how she had hope in Jeezuzz and that she had gone home to Glow-ree, and that if there was anything Sara would want him to say it was that she had found her hope in Jeezuzz would want you to, too. All of which is true – but I kept waiting for him to acknowledge the pain all of us were in (well, all of us who hadn’t been dropped into a P.T. Anderson movie) and the horrible, aching hole her death had left. Yes, we can trust that we’ll see her again in heaven if we love Jeezuzz, I wanted him to say, but in the mean time she is gone and we are grieving and THIS SUCKS.

Is this a strictly southern phenomenon, or are funerals universally this skewed? I don’t think I’ve ever attended a funeral north of the Mason-Dixon, so I don’t have a good sense of whether this is how everyone does it, or just the fogeys down South. And am I alone in feeling like this is a horribly stilted perspective, or am I supposed to be satisfied with The Promise Of Glow-ree and all that? I’m not a delayed-gratification kind of girl; I hope that speaks more to my immaturity than to my faith.

My perceptive therapist identified, from my retelling, some traits of my aunt’s that were unhealthy, things I’d always had a peripheral sense of but that I’d never overtly acknowledged. It was clear from the events of her sudden illness and death that Sara really was the hub of our extended family, the one in charge of facilitating all the relationships between everyone else. This was never more obvious than when no one called me to tell me she had been hospitalized, because she was always the one person who made those sorts of phone calls, the one in touch of getting information out. The inevitable church luncheon that followed her funeral (another Southern tradition?) was awkward not only because we were all processing the morning’s service but also because without her there to lubricate conversations, no one knew quite how to relate to one another.

My therapist’s point was that my aunt was a woman who universally loved others, universally gave herself to them, but without ever allowing herself to be filled in return: that by constantly rushing to meet others’ needs, she gave the impression of not having needs of her own to be met. (Tragic case in point: she allowed herself to be caught in the middle of a feud between her prickly, stubborn mother and sister; and as a result of her attempts to interject herself and mend their relationship, Sara and her sister hadn’t spoken in more than three years, and her sister – my aunt Sue – didn’t come to Sara’s funeral (although she did send a lovely flower arrangement)). My therapist was keen to draw a subtle object lesson out of this for me, since a recurring theme of our sessions is that I’m so determined to give the impression that I have all my shit together that I don’t let anyone close enough to meet my own needs.

It left me wondering – how many of us are there? Are there scads of us spending all our time trying to look like we have it all together, when in fact we’re lonely and desperate for connection – and pushing everyone away in the process?

Here is a picture of a nun on a scooter: 

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