Funeral Fiasco

Yesterday was Maira's wake. It was rough as you might imagine. Lots of crying and hugging. I took the day off and took Ace down to the funeral home in the Bronx early since I would have to take him home early. Ace was awesomely well behaved and as usual he was very popular. The wake itself was standard until it started getting later and then the religious contigent started standing and testifying and singing songs in the middle of their sentences. That was when I decided it was time to leave.

One of the surprise guests at the way was the mother of my childhood friend, David Salazzo. I haven't seen his mom in like 15 years or longer. She was very nice to talk to. She really liked Ace and it brought back all these awful memories to her about how mischievious I was as a child. She was like "Look at the devious look. He looks just like you." She kept mentioning stories about horible things I had done as a child. I apparently locked her out of her apartment once and also brought and entire bookshelf down on her son and myself. I also sent her son to the hospital one time. It was a fond walk down Lou's guilt ridden past. When it was time to leave I gave her a ride home to the same apartment that I locked her out of 30 year ago. On the way there we say a stumble junkie looking all crazy. I mentioned that strange uneasy walk they seem to have and she asked me "Did you ever use?" which totally caught me off guard. Since I haven't I said so but it was a strange question coming from someone I haven't seen in 20 years or more.

Burial was today. Drove out back to the Bronx and said my final goodbyes. We got in the car and drove to the mystery cemetery in New Jersey. Maria has taken care of all that stuff before her passing so everything was pre-arranged. So two hours plus later we arrived at a Cemetary somewhere very south in NJ. I guess she died a little early for the cemetary because we arrived to a dirt lot instead of a lush green field. It was literally barren clay with a huge hole dug in it by a backhoe for her coffin. This was about 100 feet from actual grass and dirt to be buried in. So we all stood in raw tan clay and sand an said our final farwells. Maria's minister, she had become a Pentecostal follower in her final years, gave a short little firey speech about her. In every speech he gave he kept saying that when she was in the plane she was already so close to God that he decided to take her. There was another woman there from the same church who would say a concurrent prayer to the one the minister was giving so there was this doppler double talk action which was kind of distracting. Also distracting was the fact that about 100 yards behind us was some crazy construction crew installing fire hydrants with big industral diggers nad cranes. So the whole time we were there and trying to be somber there was all this diesel engine groaning and clank klang krang going on.

After we finished say the final goodbye we all kind of milled aroubnd trying to figure out what to do. A backhoe drove up and they attached Maria's coffin to it with some straps. Then much to my amazement they used the backhoe to lift up her coffin and lower it into the hole. It was probably the weirdest thing I have seen at a burial. The cemetray staff wanted us to leave but we were still just saying goodbye to people who were leaving. I guess we stayed too long because the backhoe fired up again and started shoveling dirt into the hole. It was pretty nuts and not very respectful if you ask me.

On the way home we used the Garmin to find an alternate route back to Brooklyn. One that didn't involve going through Manhattan. My brother got the GPS to get us home through Staten Island which was way faster than going back through the tunnels into Manhattan the across the bridge. I love the GPS.