THE RULES OF GHOSTING (AND OTHER POST-FUNERAL MUSINGS)

“Brenen? Are you there?”

It was early in the morning and I was sitting on the hardwood floor of my Atlanta apartment looking up at the ceiling and talking to my dead brother. I don’t normally sit around talking to dead people and a part of me felt a little ridiculous but there was something I needed to know. A question I had to ask.

“Okay, Brenen, I don’t even know if you are listening and if you are, I don’t know if you can answer me. It might be against the rules up there or something.” I paused and wondered if there were rules in the afterlife. No harp playing after 11pm? Haunting permitted only on Halloween? “Anyway, there’s something I need to know and I know you can’t just outright answer any questions so I’m gonna ask you a simple yes or no question and then I’m going to put my iPod on shuffle and the first song has to answer my question. Okay? Can you do this? Are you ready?” I paused again. This was silly. No, not silly. Crazy. Great, I thought. I am losing it.

My Great Aunt Pam is losing it too. She has taped newspaper over her mirrors because she suspects they are two-way and what she thought to be some sort of recording device behind her toilet turned out to be a really old air freshener. “Sometimes I hear voices,” she said, all bug-eyed and freaked out, completely ignoring the fact that she lives in building with people living beneath, above and on either side of her.

This isn’t the first case of the crazies in my family.

I have one uncle that obsessively uses Duct Tape as a cure-all for quite literally everything and a few years ago, my Creepy Uncle claimed that he could hear voices coming from kitchen appliances. Personally, I wouldn’t mind it if my toaster oven started telling me jokes or if my juicer told me my horoscope but hey, that’s just me.

I’m not sure I can blame Great Aunt Pam and Creepy Uncle. Spend a significant amount of time in a small town like Connersville, Indiana and you might be a little off the wall too. I think it’s a proven fact that people in small towns get a little wacky. Add a funeral to the mix, and it’s almost a guarantee.

Example:
At the visitation, hour one:
STRANGER: I’m so sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do?
ME: No, thank you for coming.

But four hours and a Xanax later:
STRANGER: I’m so sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do?
ME: Well, Madonna is going on tour this fall and the tickets are really expensive…

Funny, yes. Appropriate, no. They’d walk away, only looking back to shoot me a dirty look. “Well,” I said shrugging, “you said anything.”

Of course, I was tired. I was hungry. I was stressed. I was overwhelmed. I was sad. Planning a funeral is about as enjoyable as watching Mariah Carey’s Glitter and it took a toll. “Go easy on the rouge,” I had said through clenched teeth to the funeral director, shaking his hand a little too tightly. “If you make my brother look like a drag queen we are so gonna have a problem.” He smiled nervously and walked away, shaking off my tense grip from his red hand…