Cream Puff by Kenneth Radu (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) Some days the smell of flowers nauseates. Don’t get me wrong. I am not a flower-hating sort of guy. I’m not afraid to admire roses in a city park or plant marigolds for my mother who now dribbles into her bib at the Nursing home—try to hold your head up, dear, it makes the soup go down easier—it’s just that when confronted with a certain combination of floral beauty in a specific context, I need all my mental powers, such as they are, to suppress insurrection in my stomach. Feeling much better today, but yesterday the fragrance became so potent that I gasped and had to be held up—held up!—me, a man of average build, no longer young, but not a decrepit octogenarian either—held up by two adolescent sons with iPods plugged into their ears like frigging Martians on a tour of Earth’s hot spots, except only a Martian would call that particular site a hot spot. “Show some respect,” I wanted to say, but lack of air and fear of regurgitating undigested food made me refrain. Instead, I focused on my stomach jerking about like Michael Jackson dancing. Of course the boys have picture phones—what kid doesn’t these days? And aside from rudely snapping pictures despite my admonition and severe frowns from other relatives, they actually text messaged friends and each other while the priest carted his oxygen tank to the front and began his pre-packaged spiel about “the deceased, who had never been to church in her life, but God loved her anyway, because deep down”—and the priest knew this as “self-evident truth”—“she had not abandoned her faith.” I guess all of Anna’s denials over the years equalled affirmation in her husband Phil’s eyes. How could the priest know what she believed “deep down” when she had never met the sanctified gentleman, unless Phil had insisted that she had never really meant what she said? Leave it to Anna’s husband to ride roughshod over her beliefs and disrespect her last wishes that no religious ceremony or words of any kind should be spoken at her funeral. At least Anna had left no child whose wishes her husband could also ignore. Despite the promises he made, Phil told me over the phone, burying Anna without benefit of clergy, without reference to God—why, Jesus, it made his heart virtually stop. God would forgive him for breaking his promise to the dying because, after all, he was bringing her to Him as he had no choice. By that time I was muddled by his pronouns. I blurted out, “what the hell are you talking about?” which was hardly the thing to say to a man addled by grief over the sudden demise of his wife, my twin sister, whose dying made me want to heave up my innards beside the closed casket with silver rails. That, and the arrangement of giant, odoriferous white mums and blue gladioli interspersed with yellow freesias, sucking the oxygen out of the excruciatingly well-appointed salon. Magenta drapes stood at attention like guards at Buckingham Palace and the hacking priest couldn’t complete one line of his formulaic prayers without coughing up syllables tainted with blood. “Jesus,” I almost screamed from exasperation, not faith, would you please spare us the consoling anodynes and give your cancer- mangled lungs a break? Phil once smacked my head because he couldn’t tolerate my happy scepticism. “You really chafe my ass with your fucking disbelief,” he had said. Then he proceeded unbidden to lecture me about God’s love and the reason why we were born. Anna had once told Phil that she’d divorce him if he harangued her about religion, which he had grabbed onto like a life raft after they had married. Believers occupy the earth, their name is legion. Amazing how tuned in they are to the will of God. The odour of flowers, the stillness of conditioned air, the droning priest: not surprising that I fainted and woke up on a caramel leather sofa in the funeral home's basement lounge coiffed and manicured like the salons upstairs. In this windowless room of respite from seriousness, mournful whispers and religiosity; embalmed bodies, coffee cups and stale doughnuts abounded. A wide plasma television screen affixed to a wall broadcast the empty highway down which Michael Jackson’s hearse drove. Where were the sorrowing multitudes? The media had predicted a countless throng. Where was the carnival of public lamentation the likes of which the world had not witnessed since the first crucifixion or Princess Di’s quasi-state funeral? Now, I have scant interest in celebrities and their fantasy worlds, no more real to me than comic-strip characters speaking in bubbles. The passing of a star is no occasion for wrenching grief. I saw more cops than civilians on the sidelines. Ah, a couple of fans with tearful confessions of broken hearts, feeling good about feeling bad, expressed their dismay over how their particular universe had collapsed now that Michael Jackson, a person they had never met, no longer held it up like some sort of deity, a slender Atlas in spangles and sequins. Then I heard his daughter speak about her father, just a line, “he was a great dad,” something like that, and she cried. She put to shame all the manic adulation, all the phony frenzy, all the religious hype and hyperbole, all the embarrassing drivel and mendacious eulogizing. The world did not stop turning. But Michael Jackson’s daughter, a small figure in a crowd of celebrities, spoke from a personal, grieving heart, not from propaganda, not for entertainment; so thank you, dear child, you provided the one true thing at my sister’s funeral. Then I remembered how Anna and I used to drink tea together in her kitchen, each sharing the beliefs and thoughts of the other. Holding a stale cream puff, watching Jackson’s televised memorial service, I cried.
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