Nobody seemed truly sorry for his loss. The words drifted into the lad’s ears and they held neither weight or resonance. The funeral, his first, had rolled along with a strange, dream-like autonomy. People came, readings were read and then a coffin went behind a curtain. The whole affair was so ordered and emotionless that he could not be sure that it had even occurred at all and that it wasn’t simply him reciting the order of events in his mind before they actually took place. But no, it was no rehearsal. It had happened. He had cremated his father and now he was back in the dull, semi-detached house in the middle of an indifferent street inside a city that was elsewhere, suffering through what his aunt called a ‘wake’.
It didn’t take long for the sharp-minded lad to realise that the choreography of the funeral was not brought about through robotic propriety but by a collective sense of conjoined experience. The people around him had been to many, many funerals. The 17-year-old boy realised then that someday everyone he knew would die – not just old people but schoolmates and girlfriends. Even unborn babies. Everybody. He carried on shaking the hands of the mourners as they passed him by.
