Do You Feel My Hate?

Just a few days before Thanksgiving, my family received a call from our relatives in Mexico. One that made my father have to come pick me up from work early, six minutes before the end of my shift. My aunt had passed earlier in the day, and the worst part for her family, for my mother, was that it was entirely preventable. Frustratingly so. Maybe things would’ve been different if she’d been there to push her to take better care of herself, to take her meds, to conduct herself without fear, but I don’t think so. Far too often, we dig our own graves. Our families can only do so much once we hit a certain point. Of course, we dropped everything, packed bags, and piled into the car that same evening. I remember coming home and going to my room to fill a duffel when I desperately needed to do laundry. My bag was full of second-string clothes, and while my mother cried, that was just about all I could agonize over.

I admit I’ve never been very close to my family south of the border, but that’s difficult when you only see them biannually at most and only speak half their language. Maybe that’s being too hard on myself, but it’s mostly true when I’m stuck in a conversation. The worst of it comes when I have to talk with a relative who’s basically a total stranger, who speaks too quickly for me to understand.  At least then, I have the luxury of just staring at them for a second while they resign to thinking of me as the weird kid from America.

Between trying to conduct myself like a normal person and trying to shrug off the shower on grimy tile I had our first morning in Mexico, I was struggling to keep my mind on what was important. That, and wondering if I’d cry this time. Because last time we did this, when my grandfather passed, I didn’t. At least not at first. Out of my extended family, the old man was my favorite. Things were never awkward with him, and he was pretty much my only oasis in the mass of attention that was my family. When we got word of him dying, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I wasn’t so much sad as I was thunderstruck, and that was when I started realizing that I thought of death in terms of how it related to me. This person, who I loved, would never speak to me again. I’d never see them, hear their voice, or shake their hand again (which we do a lot for a family.) And while all those things are devastating, they lose power when you just think of them so objectively and list them out like that. Now they’re just experiences that I won’t have again, and experiences come and go as easy as Texan weather. What triggered this way of thinking, I don’t think I’ll ever know. And I dread the day I lose someone truly close to me.

This feeling, or lack thereof, of guilt surrounding the fact that I wasn’t nearly as devastating as the rest of the mourning party, was all I could think of during the funeral processions. Quite literally, like when the pastor led us in prayer in Spanish, I was just going through the motions. I was never taught their songs, their prayers, nor even how to properly do that thing where you make a cross-movement across your body with your hand, kiss it, and send it upwards. But I pretended, even while my aunt’s daughter-in-law clutched my hand in some twisted touch of fate that made her sit next to me, for the sake of wanting to appear as if this affected me like it did my family.

This was all I had running through my head while we sat in the pews, and all I dwelled on still in the car ride over to the field. That, and the marvel of the embalming process. You usually don’t give it much of a second thought, but once it’s not there, its absence is immediately noticed. By the time the hearse had moved the coffin to the dusty burial grounds where we’d already gathered, I could only stomach through hearsay my aunt’s condition. I heard horror stories of her eyes opening and sinking backward and saw from an angle the way the glass panel over her had fogged up with gasses. I never got a straight answer why they didn’t spring for the embalming. Then again, I didn’t really ask, nor want the answer. Needless to say, up until the time had come to bury her, I was distracted.

By the fussy baby to my left. By the leaves of the pathetic excuse for a tree stabbing my back through my shirt. By the woman who had the nerve to cry louder than my grandmother, who’d now outlived her own daughter, then faint. By the trails left by the holy water the pastor had flicked from the tip of a gas station drink. But just before my aunt could be laid to rest, and I could once again focus on her, one more distraction would take the stage. And not the proverbial stage, either.

This guy actually stood up in front of all of us.

Not the immediate family. Not an employee of the funerary service. Not even a gravedigger. A man in a plaid shirt, Wrangler jeans, nondescript brown boots. Even in the crowd we’d formed, he was at best one of seven nearly identically dressed men. And yet, he stood out with an air of so-called authority. Because he carried a bible. And because I couldn’t say anything then, allow me to do so here.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate the book in your hands. I may not be a staunch believer, or even someone brought up to attend church, but I respect the role religion has in the lives of those experiencing hard times. I respect the comfort that it brings those who have lost and know they will someday lose again. Never, ever, would I dare take that from someone, regardless of how dearly at the time they need something stalwart to hold onto. What I hate is you. You, the nobody relative who holds a holy book like a badge of office, as if nobody would listen to you if you stood up without it. You, who decided, amidst a crying family, with the callousness of a shark, that right at that moment was the perfect time to reflect on the necessity of following the word of the Lord. You, who making a pitch for God in the middle of a funeral, halting the work of the attendants, halting peace for the family, and reading random scripture with no at-hand relevance as if each of us cradling a bible as inappropriately as you did would erase all feelings of loss. And yet, I don’t hate you just for those reasons. Not for making a fool of yourself, fancying yourself a preacher, or inadvertently prolonging the whole ordeal.

I hate you because you didn’t say a single word about the dead woman with a front-row seat to your speech.