Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (23 page)

R
EBECCA
T
HOUGHT:
It doesn’t matter where I am or what we are doing, Annie, because when I breathe or talk or look up I still expect you to be walking into the room or singing in the yard or driving up the driveway. I’ve done this before. I know how it works but I cannot get used to it. Not yet. You just piss me off. I love you.

J
ILL
T
HOUGHT:
How fun, Ms. Annie, with all the books. You had it bad for words, all those years ago, clawing your way to adulthood. Did you dream about teaching and shaping the minds in that cute little bed of yours? The bright wings of words were a way for you to fly away from here but I bet you always came back, in your mind and heart, for how could you ever leave, oh Annie of the north woods? How could you ever leave?

B
ALINDA
T
HOUGHT:
The sand on my hands, the wind in my face, that freezing cold water washing across the tips of my toes—how wonderful this is and how wonderful you must have been and how lucky to be in this place and to have what you had here. I see you dancing across the waves of this lake, laughing at the bouncing sky, and at me, too, for feeling guilty because I am here and not with my mother. Thank you for this, Annie, and for sharing your friends and for dancing slowly enough so that I can follow your steps.

M
ARIE
T
HOUGHT:
I’m here. I’m exhausted and I should have come sooner. These women are a jumble of fineness. I close my eyes, even after these few short hours, and I see you with each one of them. I miss you too, Annie. I miss you.

Lou could almost feel the house vibrating as she turned into the driveway just ten minutes this side of six
P.M.
She smiled all the way from her lodge to the Freeman house, which was 50 percent hers, which she protected from the county foreclosed bin and into the hands of the assorted cousins, one lonely uncle, herself, Annie’s boys and a handful of mismatched relatives who had all taken their summer turn at the house and who agreed with her that come hell or high water the house should never be sold.

She smelled her groceries cooking before she got out of the car, and she paused before she slammed her car door, before they heard her and ran outside to greet her. Lou paused with her hand on her heart to listen to the voices of Annie’s friends reverberating throughout the cabin and into the forest and out across the long sweep of lawn onto the beach.

Closing her eyes, she could remember a time when the sounds lasted for months with the comings and goings of uncles and aunts and cousins and Annie’s family, who refused to deny anyone who was even a remote relative from coming and staying for days or weeks at a time. She remembered beach parties, and winter skiing trips and Thanksgiving dinners that lasted for hours and often turned into weekends of fun because they all got snowed in. And she remembered Annie.

Lou, who claimed Annie as the granddaughter and the daughter she never had, Lou who always stayed behind when one and then another and then another after that left, Lou who filled her own houses with guests to keep her company and to keep the family house as vibrant and whole as possible, already knew what she was going to do as she patted her pocket, took in a deep breath, and shouted her “Yo-ho” from the drive.

Dinner was a delicious whirl of food, conversation, laughter, and wine. The women jostled around the kitchen as if they had been maneuvering in tight quarters together their entire lives. Laura, Marie and Jill were in charge of the dining room and had gathered pieces of driftwood and rocks from the beach and combined them with the flowers into a centerpiece that would make Martha Stewart blush. They had discovered a set of china and had scavenged through the house for candles. They flung open the windows, plugged in a CD, and were standing at attention in case Balinda, Rebecca and Katherine needed any assistance in the kitchen.

Lou sat at the head of the table and could not stop smiling.

“This,” she told them, “is why this house was built by Annie’s great-grandpa and this is what is supposed to be happening here all of the time. You gals have done a fabulous job. Another week, and the place would look like one of those Pottery Barn furnished joints.”

Thus began dinner and several hours of talk about Annie as a girl and Lou’s life path that took her through three marriages and so many damn funerals—all three husbands died—that she decided it was time to hang up her wedding bells and settle down like a good girl—alone. That’s when she turned into the full-time caretaker and nursing assistant as Annie’s real grandma and uncle and so many other people that she can’t even name them became ill.

“They were all too damn thin,” she laughed as she drank her wine and told her stories and laughed more than she had laughed since the day Annie had called to tell her that she was terminally ill.

“My God,” Marie whispered. “You were a hospice nurse too.”

No one meant for three and then four hours to pass but there was plenty of wine and absolutely no one wanted coffee and the party eventually moved to the porch where they settled in to ask the questions that were quickly becoming muddled by alcohol and the blinking stars and a moon that was so close to being full it could hardly keep itself in the sky.

“Shit,” Rebecca finally says. “This is so peaceful, Lou. I can see why it would be hard to find someplace better.”

“Yes, shit,” Marie agrees as they focus on Lou, who is rocking in the porch swing and watching them as if she is enjoying the best movie ever created.

“You are a wild one, Marie,” she chuckles. “I bet you keep all those dying people alive for lots of extra weeks because they are afraid to miss something.”

“Maybe,” Marie answers. “Most people are afraid of dying. Really.”

They ask her then. They ask Lou about Annie and what magical moment could have possibly occurred, besides the dozens of events they have already discussed, that could have possibly changed or imprinted Annie’s life enough to make this spot part of her traveling funeral. And Lou begins to cry.

The women all reach for her at once and Lou puts out her hand and tells them that she is “better than fine” and that what she has to say is only sad because Annie is not here to tell them herself.

“Let me cry,” she asks. “Just let me. I need this.”

The story is as simple as the spontaneous yet unpredictable ripple of the waves that roll out across the beach stones just the way they have for hundreds of years. It is a beautiful tale that rhymes with the very foundations of life and beginnings and coming to find a place that you can always touch no matter where you are.

“You think it would be something grand having to do with that washed-up photograph her grandfather used to carry,” explains Lou, rocking and crying softly. “You think it is something magical that Annie wanted you to know but I am thinking that you already know it. Just listen. It is no secret. It is not a large and mysterious story. It is just a story of Annie’s coming to know how she was formed and where she could go and what she always had.”

They listen. They listen as Lou stops crying and looks out across them and tells them a story that is as beautiful as it is simple. They listen as the moon, full as it will ever be, dips into sight and lingers for so long it looks as if it has been painted across the dark sky that connects this one spot to the rest of the world. They listen as the waves crash and they breathe in air that is pure and clean and safe and strong. They listen as they reach for each other’s hands and occasionally close their eyes and see the face of Annie G. Freeman.

“Annie had recovered from her suicide attempt,” she tells them, “it was years beyond that, and those demons that haunted not only her but so many members of our family had retreated. She was at the end of her college years, I think, maybe even past that and moving into this open, wild and wonderful place that she came to embrace as her own.”

Lou talks in a whisper. She rocks and talks and the women, Annie Freeman’s pallbearers, do not want to miss one word, one movement, one second of this story.

“The man who found the photo had lost a daughter the same age, size, and shape of Annie,” Lou recalls. “It was one of those horrible, tragic accidents where a car came out of nowhere and struck Isabelle as she was getting off of her school bus and while her mother watched from the kitchen window. God, I can see it like I was there,” Lou says, stopping for a moment to clear the image from her mind. “It was nothing more than fate, an accident, but as this always does, it devastated the family.”

The father lost his job, and eventually his wife and every single thing that he had, and he clung to this notion that his Isabelle was alive, Lou continues. Isabelle was Annie’s double. They could have been twins. When the photo of Annie washed onto shore, the father thought he knew she was alive and that the last six years of his life had been a dream and he searched the entire area with the photo clutched in his hand looking for his Isabelle.

“He found Annie instead, thinking she was his dead daughter,” she told the women. “She was sitting right there, at the kitchen table, when he came in and fell to his knees and sobbed out his story and called her Isabelle.”

The women cannot move. Their internal and external functions have become frozen inside of this story and if a bomb were to explode or the brilliant moon were to fall from the sky they would be trapped in this position forever.

“What happened?” they ask.

“My sister, Annie’s grandmother, was right here in this room and she took the man in her arms and let him cry and she told him the truth,” Lou continued. “She told him that his life was not a dream and that his baby was dead and that he needed to move on and find his life again because that is what Isabelle would have wanted.”

“What did this do to Annie?” Katherine whispered, mesmerized. “What happened to our Annie?”

There is a break in the movement and talking that puts everyone into balance. A balance so that they can see how simple, and yet how complicated, that photo washing onto shore became.

“It changed everything for Annie because she saw in this man the power of family love,” Lou says, moving forward so that her face is just inches from the women. “She had been through her own kind of hell but she had never seen that same kind of hell cross over into someone else’s life. She saw from those moments when that man bared his grieving soul what it might be like to lose everything and understanding his loss made her embrace things that are seemingly simple yet absolutely exquisite because of their truth and sincerity.”

The sound of the waves.

Her mother’s voice at the end of the phone.

The way her grandma sang while she cooked.

The reliability of the seasons.

How resounding and concrete tradition can be and become in a life.

The comfort of familiarity.

“She’d bucked against family until that time, she did not get how it is okay to celebrate your beginnings and hold them close to your soul and keep them there and then move on,” Lou said. “But that night she fell into her grandma’s arms and they talked for hours about the power of love that never changes color no matter what happens. They shared secrets and held hands and came to a place of understanding about the boundaries that are created and then relinquished in hearts and lives that are born from a family—no matter what that family looks like.

“Her life, as you know, took so many twists and turns but she always came back here, she always remembered to take care of us, she always, after that night, honored her beginnings,” Lou shared. “That is why she wanted you to come here. That is why a part of her will always be here.”

That is why.

25

The air is a narcotic vibration that reaches inside of the Freeman house and corrals Katherine, Jill, Laura, Marie, Rebecca and Balinda into a place where dreams jump and swing and rumba as if they are trapped inside of a wave that rolls on into eternity.

The women, tucked into beds from one end of the house to the next, dream about riding naked on motorcycles, dancing with dogs, reading books that weigh as much as an entire truck, and speaking in foreign tongues in the middle of a cattle drive.

Breakfast begins at 12:30
P.M.
as they stagger to the kitchen and share their night terrors while dressed in an assortment of clothing that would make the boys on
Queer Eye
collapse in shame and disgust.

“What the hell,” Katherine exclaims as she flops into a chair praying that someone else has made coffee as strong as tar. “Was it the wine? The story? The ghosts coming out of the closet? What?”

What indeed, they agree. In a matter of days, Jill explains, they have embraced not only the death of a friend who meant the world to them but discovered parts of her world they never knew existed and parts of each other’s worlds that they most likely would never have even seen if this traveling funeral had not existed.

“Think about it,” she says, swaggering over to the counter to make yet another pot of coffee. “Add a ton of wine and this emotional liquidity to the mix and we are one group of loose-limbed women.”

Without thinking, Laura suggests the ultimate in morning salutes. She stands up, throws down her coffee cup, and says, “Let’s all go jump in the lake.”

They look at her as if she’s told them they are all going to stand on the kitchen table and pierce their navels with a wooden toothpick. No one says a word.

Laura doesn’t wait. She’s a woman possessed.

“Babies!” she taunts as she turns and walks out the door and toward the beach.

They all follow. They could not stop if they really, truly wanted to.

Within five minutes there is a screaming concert of female voices that collides with the oncoming waves as one after another of the women strips off all of her clothes and jumps naked into the coldest water she has ever felt in her life. They each go under once, and then twice, disappearing inside of sluices of water that feel as if they were ice cubes just moments before.

“Oh my God,” Marie screams, running from the water so fast she trips and falls and ends up going under one more time. “Do people who swim in this water ever have children?”

They emerge as moving dots of red, their skin raw and numb, and their senses as alive and fresh and keen as they have ever been. Back at the house they wrap themselves in blankets, begin making coffee as if their very lives depended on it, and they stretch out in the great room and laugh at what they have just done, where they have been, what they have accomplished.

“This is something.” Balinda smiles, realizing in that exact moment that it has been hours since she has worried about or even thought of her mother. “I cannot believe how absolutely wonderful and alive I feel at this moment.”

“Who would have thought that this would happen in the middle of a funeral?” Rebecca asks. “I feel the same way, Balinda. I suppose Annie thought about some of this, imagined it even as she was pushing that pen across the pages, but I also suspect that she made room for the spontaneity that we all seem to be getting the hang of as each day of this traveling funeral passes.”

Jill thinks about that and about the spaces in her life that she tried to fill up with routines, never letting things just happen, always making certain she checked off her boxes, followed her plan, was in control of every second.

“It’s something,” she finally says, shifting so that her frigid feet are tucked under Katherine’s rear end. “How you think most of your living might be done and then you look up and see a new way to do something, really, a new way to live.”

Katherine puts her hand out fast and grabs Jill’s arm.

“That doesn’t take away from any of the past living,” she tells Jill. “That doesn’t take away from how you lived or what you did but obviously this, this day and this week and being with these wonderful women, has shown you and all of us that living,
really
living, needs to be spontaneous at least some of the time.”

Marie tells them that she feels as if she has the most to gain.

“Annie told me I work too much and that even though I am doing the work of the saints that it’s wrong to lose yourself so much that you don’t live either,” she tells them. “That’s all I thought about since this started. I’ve thought about Annie, of course, but for all those miles between here and there I’ve thought that maybe I’ve given away too much.”

Balinda cannot speak. She feels as if Marie is speaking for her. She thinks that maybe her mother would not have wanted her to give up quite this much.

The women who are mothers dip into the conversation as if they are being punished. They tell stories, with their heads lowered, about washing diapers and making beds and picking things up, when all that “shit,” as they call it, could have been saved and replaced with a spontaneous moment that might have been something as simple as sitting still and singing a song.

“I’d be in the middle of it,” Laura admits, “saying something like ‘No, you pick that up now,’ and would be knowing the entire time I said it that it really didn’t matter if it got picked up now and that we should just cuddle or eat a goddamn Popsicle. For some unknown reason I almost always kept going instead of just, well, stopping for a moment.”

Stopping for a moment.

The women look at each other, eye to eye, making the rounds from one face to the next without saying a word, and they realize, in those quiet seconds, that Annie wanted them to have this conversation. She wanted them to sit naked under blankets, sipping coffee on a summer afternoon at the home where her roots were. She intended for them to discuss the importance of just simply doing precisely what they were doing.

They know, each one of them, that they don’t have to say another word. They know that they could just sit there, they know that they could get up and do the tango or recite some interesting Annie story, or walk to town in their bare feet for more beer or coffee, and that would be okay also.

“Damn,” Laura finally says. “Annie really was something.”

“She was and so are you and so are all of us,” Katherine adds.

“I’m thinking,” Balinda says, smiling so widely that she starts laughing, “that if word of this catches on and people realize how much fun they could have at funerals, people would be dying to try it.”

They all throw something at her—pillows, shoes, socks and books go flying and then Jill turns the conversation into something more practical than serious but serious in a way that makes them all turn and look at her.

“The ceremony,” Jill asks them. “Does anyone want to focus on that for just a second?”

Yes. They all want to focus on it and not as a chore, they agree, but as a wonderful part of the entire “up north” experience that has already changed how they think about the benefits of spontaneity and how they will forever feel about cold water.

“Ideas?” she asks them.

“Well, outside,” Rebecca says forcefully.

“I’ve already thought about it,” Balinda says next. “Is it okay if I say what I was thinking about this even if I am not part of the original group?”

The women look at her as if she has just told them she’s got a hidden camera under her armpit and they will be on the ten
P.M
. news swimming nude in Lake Superior. No one says anything and she gets that point just as much as if they had yelled into her face.

“I was thinking about a campfire, one on this little bluff I found this morning before you all got up,” Balinda tells them. “I went for a walk because, as you know, I was the one who was drinking the least amount of wine, and right off to the left of the house there’s a trail that winds to a bluff and there are little chairs made out of trees and a place to build a fire and I was just thinking that the whole setup looked like Annie even though I never knew Annie.”

Before she even finishes they all know that is where they will be holding the second-to-the-last phase of the traveling funeral.

“Can you see the lake?” Katherine asks Balinda, just to be certain. “We’d have to see the lake.”

“Of course. And if you turn your head just a bit you can see the cabin and off to the side it is nothing but solid trees. From what we’ve discovered it seems like that would be the perfect combination of this part of Annie’s life, what she learned, what she was trying to share with us.”

It’s settled and they also agree that Lou must be called with the details in case she objects, which she does not. She does not, however, want them to cook dinner as she is making a huge pot of soup, which she will bring over at four
P.M.
—“on the dot”—and when she finds out how they have spent part of the day she laughs so loud that Rebecca has to hold the phone away from her ear. “You girls,” they can hear Lou say through a laugh that barely needs the telephone. “Oh, you girls.”

They sleep and walk and call their children and a neighbor or two, their lovers and husbands and the nursing home and then they just wait in a way that leaves them ready for not only the spreading of Annie’s ashes on the shores of Lake Superior but anything that might happen—anything at all.

The moon does not appear near the Freeman homestead until it is past eight
P.M.,
and Lou explains to them that by the middle of summer it stays light very, very late and the long days help some of them make amends for the terribly long and always cold winters.

“In another few weeks we’ll be out here reading on the beach at ten
P.M.
,” she explains as they put away the last of the dinner dishes and begin slipping their tennis shoes on for the procession to the campfire zone.

Lou is not surprised when they tell her where they have decided to have the up-north funeral. She wondered if they had discovered the family fire pit where generations of Freemans have been holding court, deciding the fate of each other, the world and whatever else they felt like deciding as they burned trees that had succumbed to the perilous Lake Superior weather, sat close enough for their knees to touch, and soaked in the miraculous healing rays of the northern lights and a sky that seemed to grow more enormous each year.

“The parties we have had up there,” Lou recalls, slapping her knees. “If the trees and sand and sky could talk, it would pretty much be an endless tale of Freeman fun and frivolity. And some seriousness, too, because I can tell you lives were changed around the campfires that we had up there.”

Before they leave the house, the women want to know. They want to know about the changed lives and if anything more remarkable than what they have already discussed happened to Annie. Was she always alone? Who came with her? Were there arguments? Did people fall in and out of love?

“Whoa . . .” Lou stops them by putting her hands up as they stand around the kitchen. “All of the above. Annie brought a few friends now and then. Katherine, I am surprised you never came up here, but if I remember correctly the timing was always off. That young man from Florida who you went to see, he came twice actually. Never her husband, but then again that only lasted about twenty minutes.”

After that, Lou tells the women, Annie disappeared from the shore as she kick-started her professional career and began having babies.

“You know what those years are like,” Lou says. “Too busy to breathe. But she occasionally brought the boys up. I think those two boys were here about five or six times over the years and they absolutely loved it every time they came, and hated to leave,” she said. “They know they are welcome and I imagine when they clear away the sorrow surrounding Annie’s death they will return to reconnect with her past—their past as well.”

And yes, there were romps in the bushes and some uncles flinging whiskey bottles into the rolling waves during particularly heated discussions and of course even the glorious surroundings of a place like this don’t erase the realities of real life, real emotions and the very real people behind all of those things, Lou said.

“Well, you don’t really forget the crap, do you?” she asks. “You might put a blanket over it and push it to the back of your mind but that doesn’t really make it go away. Like Annie’s suicide attempt.”

Oh, that, the women nod. The suicide attempt.

“We talked about it after it happened. And we all agreed that the next time Annie came to visit, we would not bring it up, but we wouldn’t shy away from it either,” Lou remembers. “It was there. It was always there, but it got dimmer and I know some of us were brave enough to ask her questions and I know that as she grew older and wiser herself those questions were always easier to answer.”

“Such wisdom,” Rebecca tells Lou. “We should have just come here and done the whole ash-spreading right in one spot.”

The one spot is definitely the correct spot for this segment of the traveling funeral, they agree. The women wind their way through the trees and end up yards from the house carrying the mixings for s’mores that Lou gave them when she found out there was going to be a fire. Paul had already stacked an entire cord of wood on the hill and Lou (Who would have thought! the women joke with her) has snagged a bottle of brandy and plastic cups for a toast or two as they tend the fire and stretch out the traveling funeral into a night of long discussions.