The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 10

( cont. January 9, 2013, previous pages remaining UNSENT )

They’ve scheduled the funeral for Guy at last, and it’ll be on February 16, so that’s finalized. Liz has asked me to deliver some kind of homily, which has me in a bit of a panic. I ought to simply refuse, but then the woman’s husband has just died, so you like to say yes to anything she asks.

The thing is that I have been called upon to speak at a funeral only one other time in my life, and it went poorly. A terrible result. My mother died with cancer when I was eighteen. I wish you could have known her. She was beautiful, kind, patient. She had these two odd duck adopted children and she treated us as if we were the king and queen! She was always sort of laughing, or smiling, or making light. Anyway, she had cancer on again off again through her life, and it killed her eventually, and when it did my father went to pieces. Honestly, it was like my mother was the makeup of his skeletal system, she died and the bones POOF disappeared, and the rest of him, the meat, the organs, the skin, slopped to a pile. He was this way for about a year until he remarried (new bones, new skeleton). Anyway, when Mother died someone had to deliver remarks and I took one look at my father and knew he wouldn’t be able to do it, and my brother was young (only ten years old) and he’d gone mute. Felix didn’t speak a word from when she died until he was twelve or so (let me tell you, that was an entire situation in and of itself), so I was the one for the eulogy. I wrote something to read, had it all down, just your standard things about how she’d been a good mother, and referencing her kindness in adopting children, etc., and her volunteerism in the community. I got up to the front of the church and I’d been feeling fairly awful that week between her death and the service, just a dull nausea, the way my body was inhabiting the grief, and I stood there, went hot, and vomited. Mortifying.

That said, I do feel it would afford me the opportunity to answer certain questions that have been asked of me over the years. Explanations for why I would give up the law practice to follow Guy to the courts. Not that the man’s funeral should be my platform, but it would be good to have an audience—I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about how wonderful it was. I do miss it. Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a good opportunity to say my piece and close the door. We’ll see.

My sight seems to be holding.