Still thinking about Saturday

Here I go, first journal post. I'm up late writing and can't keep the images from the funeral I went to last Saturday out of my head. It wasn't anyone in my family, or even anyone I know very well--a daughter of one of my Dad's friends from work. I'd met her once but that was it.

She's was only a year older than me, and although nobody's saying the word, the fact that nobody's saying anything about how she died makes me think suicide.

I feel bad about that, but that's not the thing that makes me keep thinking about the funeral.

I keep seeing her stuck in that box covered with flowers. We all had to walk by her and since everone else looked, so did I. The memory makes me want to retch.

She did not look life-like. This is the second funeral I've been to and no one looks life-like, it was terrible.

The worst part was the funeral directors, the business, no, the routine of the service. Horrifying, just horrfying.

The coffin was all tricked out with this layered tulle ruffle around the edges and a thick lacy blanket covering the part where the bottom half of the coffin was shut.

Before we lined up to see her, they removed the ruffle and balnket and tucked it into the bottom of the coffin. The funeral diretors movements reminded me of this guy at the Taco Bell, automatic like he was wapping his five hundredth burrito for the day, the expression on his face was that detached.

But the part that really sickened me came after everyone sat back down. They rewrapped the coffin in it's tulle and lacy finery methodically, took care to straighten it just so.

I figured out they took that stuff off so we could get a good look at her dead.

I hope my funeral is a farce. I want them to drop the body, the lace to snap off and hit someone in the head, everything to go wrong, anything but that terrible methodical, inhuman calmness of funeral directors.

Hopefully, I've got a long time to go; but seeing her there just one year older than me, it makes me sick. Not for her, for myself. I'm not suicidal, but a car accident, anything and then it's me they're putting some doily around.

Lei