The cremation

One morning soon after Keith's death I stepped outside and saw my elderly neighbor Maria hanging her washing out. When she noticed me she stopped. She had news for me.
"He gets done two o'clock Monday."
"His funeral?"
"Where they get burnt? Behind the little curtain?"
"He's being cremated?"
"Yeah, that's it."
Keith went behind his little curtain in the company of about ten of his neighbors. I got a lift with Grace, a lady who lives across from me. He had been fixing her screen door the week he died. We got there an hour early and there were only two or three of Keith's friends there. Someone said, apparently a young man was going in before Keith, and no-one had come to see him off. This made me feel very sad for the young man. I wondered if it had been a drug overdose, whether he had so alienated his family that even his own mother had not come.
Nearby there was a large refreshment centre under construction. The idea of eating lunch at a crematorium quite repulses me, but I guess the old folk do like their tea and scones. I wondered how it would feel to be old, and face the regular funerals of your mates. I remembered that the week before he died, Keith had driven Gordon to a friend's funeral at the very same place.
I looked at the beautifully kept gardens and thought Keith would've certainly appreciated them. The sky was peacock blue and in the sun it was . I wandered around reading the inscriptions on the headstones. Some dusty toy RAAF planes were askew on a young man's grave, beside a dead bunch of flowers. "Still flying", the inscription said.
A young couple drove up in a small car and parked. They walked arm in arm over to a headstone. After they drove away I wandered over to inspect the headstone. I thought they must have lost a baby, but it seemed that one of them had probably lost their sister. A glossy photo of a wide-mouthed girl was embedded in the stone, and she seemed to laugh at the whole idea that she could be dead.
After the eulogy the funeral director, who had seemed to be reading from a standard script ("[blank]" was a wonderful man, loved by all...") asked if anyone wanted to speak about Keith. No-one spoke. In the row in front of me his best friend Gordon ignored a few nudges and low murmurs from his family. He did not want to speak. And Keith would've understood, I thought. There was nothing to say, anyway. We all had our relationship with Keith, and we all would remember him differently and feel his loss in a different way. It did not actually interest me to know how the others in the room remembered him and I suspected others felt the same.
The funeral director cleared his throat.
"Fine, then we'll just say the lord's prayer and then we'll have the committal."
As everyone started to murmur I found myself first chiming in, then mouthing the words, then looking at my lap, feeling guilty, saying nothing. Surely it would be hypocritcal to even mouth a prayer when both Keith and I were atheists.
Two dark red velvet curtains cranked towards his coffin from both sides, and his coffin disappeared.
After the funeral we were all a bit happier, especially his mate Gordon who had been clearly suffering over the time it took to get him sent off. Keith had lain in a morgue for twelve days, as they tried to trace his family, though there was none and we could've told them that for free.
I know he would've enjoyed the Indian summer we've had lately.
I have some more thoughts about Keith but they are still percolating, so more another time.

Where do people go when they just go

Hey, do you ever go here by mistake? I sometimes do. I get a little shock.

"My truck sits in the driveway, its alternator to tired to keep the battery charged. The lumber racks have cobwebs from sitting for just six weeks."

I think, since when does Jen have a truck? But for a few seconds I see you in the truck. You have a grin. You're wearing a red shirt and your blonde fringe sticks out under your truckers cap. Just as I'm wondering why your truck has been off the road for six weeks, I realise it's not our site.
I've been a bit reflective the past week. My neighbour died suddenly, and we'd had a sort of friendship for a year. I'm trying to find the right way to mourn. I think 'grieve' is too strong a word for what we had. I did have a few days when I got a little teary every time I opened my front door (his house faces mine).
Even a week later I still don't want to sing in my kitchen because I feel like I'm dancing on his grave or something. His old mate Gordon also lives in our group of houses--they'd been friends for five years, so he's lost.
I sometimes feel sad when I look at his red bougainvillea, which he had trained into a heart shape on the front of his house, facing the street, always making me think of a bower bird. Now, I worry who will look after it for him. How long will it take for his garden to die, too?
I was ambivalent about Keith. He was a lonely man, eager for company and we often chatted beside our jacaranda. It wasn't the kind of relationship where I would invite him in the house for tea which occasionally made him surly. Once, I arrived home to find him sitting on his bench, holding a longneck, staring past me.
"I haven't seen you in a week," he said. There followed a short tense conversation and after that, things were a bit awkward for a while.
I last saw him Tuesday night and to be honest I did think he looked grey, older than usual. He had been drinking at the club and had walked home with two bottles in a plastic bag. We were unlocking our doors and I was teasing him about his love-life, which he had always done to me.
"Isn't it time you got yourself a lady friend, Keith," I joked, after we discussed how he'd be celebrating his birthday the next day.
"Don't worry, I get plenty of--", and he paused abruptly as the sixteen-year-old girl from next door shuffled past.
"--opportunity, I can assure you," he said. After a moment, he turned away and muttered,
"But I don't care, anyway. I'm checking out."
I remember pausing either because of an unusual tone or because I felt I hadn't heard him properly.
"Tanked out?" I clarified, thinking he meant he was drunk.
"I'm checking out," he repeated softly and went into his house. I turned away, thinking he must have meant he was checking out of the bowling club scene, or something. Then, quite strangely, he came back out, bent down to my child and said--in a stagey way, I remember thinking at the time--"Bye, H.," and went back inside without a glance at me.
The next morning when I went outside I saw two policemen talking to Gordon and his wife.
My son burst out our gate behind me as Gordon, with a strange look on his face, came and told me quietly that Keith had died the night before.
Gordon had woken to find Keith's car parked on the verge and the front door opened, and had called the police who had found the body.
I looked at his big red heart vine, and in front of it, the policemen and my son in pyjamas, weaving in and out of them brandishing his blue ukelele.
You big bastard, Keith, I thought. Checking out like that.
See, my first thoughts were that he had committed suicide. It was his birthday, Anzac Day. But later we all learnt the doctor had confirmed it had been a massive heart attack. I spent a week feeling guilty as hell about the way I'd put distance between us in recent months. At first I was relieved to hear it had been natural causes, but then I felt guilty again when I realised that I had probably still somehow contributed to his death by letting him mow our lawns when he was clearly no longer as fit as he thought he was.
It's a strange feeling to mourn someone you didn't even know that well, but who was nevertheless a daily fixture in your life. He tended our front garden, mowed the lawn, gave us lifts in a downpour. He left his morning Herald on my doorstep before seven every morning when he returned from his swim in the ocean (and wherever he is, he'd be laughing at how I'm missing that paper every day). And there he always was when we opened our front door, pinning his large maroon undies to the line opposite, or standing on Gordon and Maria's roof fussing with a broken arial, or wheeling his bin out a full day early, and gossiping with someone about someone else. A few days before he died he made sure I knew our new neighbours down the back were gamblers.
He was sixty-nine.
Since he died I've really felt like getting things done, that's all I can really say. I suddenly remember something about seizing the day. Here today, gone tomorrow, just like that.
Well, love to you. What have you been doing, I wonder? Your emails are so brief, just a fleeting smile down the wires, like the image of you in your truck.
Write soon.