Travelogue from a funeral
I arrive in London with a strategy: I’ll interpose the funeral between two weekends with my oldest friends. Historically I’d never afford myself an opportunity for enjoyment in sober times such as these, but I’ve been persuaded it may be allowed and even preferred to aim for balance. I keep expecting someone to become indignant with me and ask why I’m not doing more, but no one ever does.
I’m on a Medrol steroid pack to address the mild resurfacing of symptoms—pain, swelling—that has occurred over the past month. Air travel is typically torture but on Prednisone I feel divine, and realize this is how it would feel to be normal. (In later days the facial swelling and skin breakouts will cause me to reconsider.)
On the way from the airport, laden down with suitcase and Patagonia black hole, I totally don’t stop at a small luxury boutique and hand out Adderall to the staff while buying a necklace. Like, that would just be unhinged.
I’ve never been to this friend’s house, and I arrive in a proud and slightly manic state, having ridden many forms of public transit without any sleep - all by myself! It’s the quintessential Victorian London flat, replete with dalmatian. If I didn’t live in a quintessential Brooklyn Brownstone I would be seething with jealousy. Green velvet and pink linen and real wood and healthy plants, all spread about in that way that appears both haphazard and exquisitely considered.
This woman is my sister, apart from technicalities; we spent the first decade of our lives together in our rural village. We have the easygoing camaraderie of people who have nothing to prove, lose, or anything in between.
We eat, we talk, we walk. At midnight in a Brixton cocktail bar, while we’re waiting for daiquiris, I get a frantic call from the US. It’s my dogsitter and she’s having a severe mental health crisis. I spend the next three hours performing a sort of hostage negotiation, persuading her to leave the dog and the apartment, and calling all of my friends desperately to find someone who can stay there on short notice. It all comes together eventually, but I miss the reading I was supposed to give the following morning.
*
At some point we realize it’s technically possible to reunite all of the kids from our village for a karaoke night, so we set about it. Even my brother is persuaded to take the train down from Blackpool.
Twenty five years ago you’d find us roaming the moors, out of sight or earshot, inventing reality. Now we’re in a Soho basement surrounded by dolled up revelers. Apparently karaoke classics differ across the pond, so the only songs we all join in on are the 80s classics.
My brother and I share deep registers. He does Johnny Cash, I do Dusty Springfield. We’ve diverged so much, but this night our inborn similarities are shining. What is it that makes siblings? Like, why do we both know all the words to Minnie the Moocher?
We end up at some club where they’re playing UK rap, which always sounds so quaint to me, and none of the kids can dance. They keep trying to grind on me, but I say “show me your moves first” and one after another they fair to pass muster.
*
“I’ve only been to three funerals in my life.”
“I haven’t been to one in twenty year’.”
“This is my third in three years,” I say, as though I’m standing up for myself.
“Bloody angel of death,” my uncle cracks. It’s a good one, I’ll hand it to him.
I’m poignantly aware as I drive through the bleak grey streets of this forgotten Northern town, that this may be my last time here. If my grandad moves to a care home before my next trip. The end of a twenty-two year era. I’ve always hated it, but it’s unsettling to confront finality in any form.
My terrestrial ties to this country, this birth place, are being severed.
I thought it would be unbearably hot, as it has been the previous five years, but my streak of weather luck has run out and I am not dressed for the rain and the cold. I buy a cardigan in a charity shop and curse the British weather.
*
The day of the funeral arrives, and we understand the task at hand is to help the widower survive. He’s still shellshocked, repeating “it was supposed to be me.” The hearse arrives with a logo for the CO-OP stickered in the window, and the cheapness of this is discomfiting.
Somehow in this region of tacky 1960s holiday houses there is a beautiful stone church surrounded by trees, and here I deliver the remembrance, and I break down in the middle and soldier on anyway. What strikes me is how small the crowd is in the crematorium. How it was the same for my paternal grandmother. But for my young friend we were crowding out into the halls, and it was a fight to make it to the front to speak.
It’s so different now that I understand there’s no perfect speech - there’s no way to craft a key out of your actions that will somehow unlock the door to the past and bring the person back to life. So it’s about what you can do without killing yourself too.
Afterwards there’s a small gathering at a local pub and that’s that. A beginning and an end, intertwined.
*
On the drive back down I’m trying to workshop an essay on my changing feelings towards this country. I’ve really hardened against it. But what’s coming together in my mind feels cynical and pejorative, and I don’t feel I have the right to criticize it in the way I am, so I give up and crawl through the five hours of road works back to London with an empty mind.
My childhood best friend picks me up at the car rental drop-off and whisks me to his apartment for the night before we depart for a few days in Málaga for my birthday. I couldn’t take another anniversary in those conditions, and I’m giddy with relief to let it all float away for a while.
*
Flying over Spain is an hour of the brownest patchwork dust fields I’ve seen since road tripping through central California, and I recall seeing the news about 120 degree days there in June and feel some passing guilt over the totally unnecessary flight I’m taking.
(Let me tell you about the time I spent 72 terrified hours holed up in an unconditioned house in Seattle in 115 degrees, trying to keep the dogs safe, watching the garden turn to tinder. Everything that has followed, ever since, feels like it’s occurring during an extended wake for the world that had been.)
In Málaga we do the usual, I guess: the sea, the hotel pool, eating great food, drinking mediocre cocktails, wandering around the gorgeous Moorish castles, and it’s all absolutely lovely. We want to take an hour long taxi to a fantasy structure called the Castillo Monument, built by some American in honor of Christopher Columbus (fuck him!). The pictures online remind me of the place I’ve always wanted to go, Las Pozas, in the Mexican jungle. But, wrapped up in the former list of activities, we run out of time.
I go through a raucous series of wardrobe changes as though it’s demanded of me. I want to be cute-cute-cute or chic, but I have the sneaking suspicion I’m just looking tired and worn out, as I have been for months, and the bright dresses only draw attention to the situation.
Ever since the long round of steroids last year when my medication stopped working I haven’t looked the same. Even friends and family agree. It feels like I’m wearing someone else’s face. There are much worse things to happen to a face, but as the incels say a few millimeters makes a world of difference. When I catch my reflection in a fluorescent-lit mirror—YIKES!
Wandering to dinner, we discuss how we always take things so literally. Like, if you say ‘let’s fly to Costa Rica in September’ I’m going to be looking up tickets. We always forget that it’s only a subset of people who say what they mean. And that’s how we ended up here, in Málaga, and everywhere else we’ve been, thirty years of follow-through on a sequence of errant impulses.
There’s a global tech outage caused by some third-party software used by Microsoft, so all across the world planes are grounded and banks aren’t working. None of it affects us at all, though it feels uneasily like foreshadowing. (Doesn’t everything these days.)
*
Why did I do this? A two and a half hour flight to Luton, three-ish hours to navigate across London, and then another seven hours flying to JFK and then an hour taxi home on top of it. What the fuck?
On the jetway (waiting interminably to board our budget plane) I see a tweet quoting from High Rise, and then I’m trying to download a copy of JG Ballard’s complete stories from LibGen. I download, no joke, seven different times, and they keep being Courier font PDFs or whatever a MOBI file is, until I finally secure an unformatted epub. My iPhone book library is looking, if I may say so myself, nice. Bolaño, Ballard, Fitzgerald, Denis Johnson. This bitch reads!
The plane is delayed thirty minutes, then another hour. I started investigating whether I can change my NYC flight (the Microsoft outage buying me some luck, being able to change without penalty). But then the pilot places a phone call and we leave only an hour late. Everyone aboard is consumed by the intrigue of why pilots don’t do this more often.
Midflight in purgatorial air space. Looking out the window, Please be the ocean ahead, though I don’t think it is. Just more dry hazy land. The way it looks is reminding me of the second-to-last road trip I took with my dying friend three years ago. We reached a high plateau of desert, the expanse at the top of the coulées. We spotted an abandoned house and I pulled over so we could shoot it.
The house was just desert-dried planks of wood, who knows how old, and the graffiti and broken glass of teenage parties. Dutifully we took our photographs. Why was I taking the pictures? Why was he? We had so many, already, all of these distant scenes and skies, and nearly none of each other, none together. There’s a stretch of time that we all have, and it’s cliché to point out that we don’t know how long our portion is. Even if we become aware we just tend to shove things into it, one after another, often carelessly and without ceremony.
Now we’re over the sea. So it’s not much longer - just sea, then land, then sea, then land, then sea, and then land again - and then a taxi ride from the airport home.