Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (28 page)

“I’m really going to seriously consider buying Annie’s house and moving there.”

No one but Marie, who has not been on board long enough to hear the earlier discussions, seems surprised. Laura explains to Marie how she and her husband have been considering moving for several years and how Annie talked to her about buying the house before she died.

“For a long time, when our daughter took off, we kept saying how we couldn’t leave because she might come back at any moment,” Laura tells Marie. “But this is just how she is. She’ll be fine. She just can’t stand still and remember for months and months that there’s anyone but her in the entire universe. We’ve both been tired of the city for a long time and we are both pretty transferable.”

Rebecca can barely imagine it. “Really?”

“Really,” Laura responds, smiling widely.

“Do you take out your own garbage?”

“Never.”

“Then you have my vote,” Rebecca laughs.

Laura said that their modest Chicago bungalow had been appraised way higher than they had imagined and that Tom was prepared to transfer to a smaller company in Sonoma County, where the cost of living was actually cheaper than in Chicago and much closer to the vineyards, as Tom liked to say. They had decided that their roving daughter would be able to find them if she ever chose to come home.

Her work at the women’s center, Laura says, can transfer to numerous nonprofit agencies in one of the cities or towns near Annie’s house that are always looking for someone with lots of experience who is willing to work long hours for low pay, and with little or no hope of advancement or a salary increase.

“Perfect for me,” she says, laughing. “That’s where my heart is anyway.”

“Laura, this is unreal, fabulous, perfect news,” Rebecca says, trying to get out of her seat to embrace Laura. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

“Well, if this trip is any indication, it means we could be in really big trouble.”

“Balinda?”

“She’ll be okay. Actually, having her on the trip and seeing that she is getting ready to fly again, without an airplane, helped make my decision become even more clear. We have sort of been taking care of each other, even though Balinda thinks I have been taking care of her. I think this traveling funeral helped her get her life back.”

“My God!” Jill exclaims, slapping her hands against her thighs. “All we need is Barbra Streisand to come up the aisle singing and I think we’ve got ourselves a musical.”

Their words become a kind of musical as they sing through the days they have just shared and the messages that cradled them through hours of grieving.

“It’s so odd, isn’t it,” Jill asks, “that we know we are all going to die and that we have these difficult passages to go through with our parents and friends and other people we love and care about who are also going to die. And yet it’s almost as if we are never really
ready
. Does that make sense?”

“Well,” Laura tells her, “it’s one thing to think about it but then the reality of it, when it really happens, is like a breathtaking and almost frightening experience. We all knew Annie was dying but when the boys called us to tell us that she really had died, it was as if that was the first time we even knew she was sick.”

“Nothing can prepare you,” Rebecca says quietly.

“Exactly,” Laura agrees. “And it will happen again and again. Balinda’s mom will die, my mom will probably end up living with us, one of your friends will die of breast cancer . . . it is sort of endless.”

A luscious moment of silence slips into the conversation for just a second, not longer than it takes for a true thought to climb its way into the minds of each one of the women.

“I’ll say it,” Rebecca says. “Annie’s thing was to concentrate on the living. To honor every day and every person in some interesting way because that’s what you had, just that one moment.”

“True,” Katherine adds. “I think she thought it was important to honor a life, the way it was lived, the potential it had to grow and change. But she also wanted us, and now all the people we have touched, to see that saluting someone after they die can be done in a way that allows us to grieve and to celebrate. Does that make sense?”

Of course, they agree.

Of course Annie was one of the most alive and vibrant people they had ever known and her ability to reach places in people through roadblocks and long tunnels and sealed off passageways was remarkable. It was also remarkable that she thought they saved her and how they think she saved them.

Of course there are many ways to celebrate death and life and of course as they bounce into their forties and fifties and sixties the fingers of time grow a bit longer and yet, they agree, and yet life does not stop. Life does not stop or wait even if you do. Pause if you must, the women agree, but then catch up fast, run with the wind, slide down the hill tumbling headfirst so that you can fall into the hands of now—today, every day, every minute, every second.

Of course it is also okay to hold on to your grief and ride it as if your own life depended on it through a sea of rough water, waves as high as heaven, through the thunderous barrage of emotions that are the very heart of loss—any loss—love, death, job—a slice of a segment of your life that made up the whole.

Of course they also agree—the whole damn world needs to have more fun. A hell of a lot more fun.

Which is what they decide to do during the last two hours of the plane ride once they have called Marie’s husband on the fun in-seat phone to make certain he will be at the airport to drive them all to Rebecca’s house before they scatter back to their own worlds with fresh wind under their wings. First they tap the edges of Annie’s shoebox as a concluding salute and slip the funeral book inside it for safekeeping during the last hours of the traveling funeral and once they have agreed to celebrate with as many people on the plane who want to celebrate and share the secrets of the formation of a traveling funeral and the life of Annie G. Freeman.

Before they can leap into more conversations or walk to the bathroom or have an engaging session with all the fine folks on the plane who have been sending them notes and trying to buy them drinks they hear a tapping on the intercom system. They think it’s a weather report but it isn’t. It’s not a weather report at all.

“Ladies and gentlemen, and you too Frank,” a woman laughs into the intercom. “Sorry, I had to say it. This is Beverly, the head flight attendant again, but maybe not for long after this. My wonderful friend Frank, who everyone on the plane knows now, has something he’d like to say, so sit up, get your head off the tray and out of your horrid dinner and listen up.”

Who wouldn’t be listening up? The women look at each other, laugh out loud and yes, right into their horrid dinners and wait for whatever in the heck Mr. Frank has to say.

“I should throw you out the window,” he tells the attendant, “but as most of you know, we have more important things to do.”

Something has obviously happened that Annie G. Freeman’s pallbearers know nothing about because the entire plane, without them, is clapping.

“Katherine, can you come up here for a second?”

Katherine looks around and realizes Frank is talking to
her
. Laura pushes her to her feet and Katherine swaggers to the front of the plane where Frank is waiting for her.

He begins by telling her that every single person on the airplane, all 289 of them, was stranded at the airport at the same time as Katherine and her friends. He tells her he is a minister but before that he was a real person, just a man, and that the entire planeload of passengers has been touched by the traveling funeral, by what they know and have learned about Annie G. Freeman and the friends she has, who have been whooping it up across the country to honor her life.

“This isn’t about religion or anything more subtle than us, every single person on this plane, wanting to let you know and Annie if we could, that we agree there is more than one way to live and more than one way to celebrate a life after it’s over,” he tells Katherine, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “We passed the hat and collected fourteen hundred dollars that we want to donate in her name to one of the scholarship funds for Annie’s programs we found online that help kids who need just a bit of a push to the next truck stop.”

Katherine is astounded.

Laura is astounded.

Rebecca is astounded.

Marie is astounded.

Jill is astounded.

“Before you say anything,” Frank goes on, “we also want you to know that you have given us a fine glimpse into the heart of uncommon friendship, the spirit of grieving—which we all do and have done and will do again—and a notion that having a great time, of grabbing a moment even if it’s just a stranded moment at the airport, is just as important as turning off the hall light before you go to bed. We think you are all terrific.”

The noise from the clapping is just as loud as the engines and then the pilot comes on and tells Katherine that any time her girls need to go on another traveling funeral they should give him a call and he’ll make sure they get a smooth ride.

Katherine hesitates for just a second and then she takes the microphone and tells them all, “Thank you.” She hesitates again, and then says:

“We thought this was going to be an intimate celebration for a woman, a friend who was a very important part of our lives, but as many of you know, as we rolled into one day after another we realized that not only are there many ways to grieve but that sharing sorrow, reaching out, being honest about your loss is as important as anything,” she tells them. “If someone had told me a month ago that I’d be standing up here and lecturing an airplane crowd, I would have checked them in to the nearest hospital. I know Annie would have said go kiss someone, go swim naked, go quit the job you hate, go celebrate your own life before it’s over. Go. Do something and do it with gusto and gratitude and with a laugh at the back of your throat, a laugh that never ends.”

Holy shit.

“Holy shit” is what Annie G. Freeman’s fabulous friends think and say as Katherine sits back down and the plane circles toward San Francisco and dips its wings to the ocean, a salute, a homecoming high-five, and then lands into a world that will never be, should never be, the same.

Hours later, when Rebecca, Katherine, Laura, Jill and Marie are sitting on the back steps of Rebecca’s house and have watched the afternoon sky float in circles—darkness chasing light in the nightly ritual—the women each take a breath, the wind stops for just a second, there are no birds winging across the line of trees searching for a night nest that will cradle their wings, the sound of traffic echoing from one hill to the next disappears and they all lean forward as if someone has gently pushed them from behind.

They lean forward and they look around the corner into the next day, that tiny sliver of light that never really fades, that stays glued to the edge of the world no matter how tight the darkness descends, and they catch the scent of something that they remember as earthy, sweet, bold and warm. It is the scent of Annie wrapping her arms around each of them as they move forward in directions that a great cartographer would need a new map to follow. It is a scent that will always stay with each of them. It is the fuel each needs to remember, to move forward, and it will never ever go away.

Epilogue

The women all decided to spend the night at Rebecca’s and they spread out with blankets and old sleeping bags from the porch to the living room and upstairs into the two back bedrooms. During the night, just three hours after they finally gave it up and no one could utter another word, a small rainstorm—the last bark of the mega-storm that stranded them in Minneapolis and left a wide slap across the nation—sprinkled its footprints on the lawn as if someone had been tiptoeing to try and get into the side windows.

When they gathered for breakfast the following morning, slumped over coffee and scrambled eggs and a huge bowl of fruit that Marie had purchased at the roadside stand, they began sharing their night’s dreams.

“My gawd,” Jill drawled. “I was on a boat with a mess of people I did not know and all of a sudden there was a parade. A parade on the water. Boats with lights and people dancing and dogs barking. It was awesome.”

“What?” Laura asked just about the same moment as Rebecca, Marie and Katherine.

What, because every single one of them had a dream that featured a parade and water. Waterfalls, a lake, Marie swimming toward some fireworks after a parade, a canoe ride up a river that ended up being part of an annual festival. The women looked at each other, shook their heads, said, “Annie,” and then kept going as if this kind of cosmic similarity had become a routine part of their lives.

Laura stayed with Rebecca for a week and the two women spent a great deal of time at Annie’s house sorting through her personal effects with her two sons and then working out a final arrangement for Laura and her husband to purchase the house. After Annie’s sons took what they wanted—a few pieces of furniture, most of her books, and family treasures like photographs and the back porch swing where Annie loved to sit and talk to her boys—the women held a huge rummage sale that quickly turned into an Anniefest and a grand yard party for the entire neighborhood, the university community, and what seemed like half of California.

Laura and Tom moved into Annie’s house three months later. Tom found a job at a small company as the business manager, and when the county restructured its facilities management plan and the director of emergency services retired, Laura applied for the position and got the job. It took her less than a month to reorganize the entire department and to design and apply for a grant to offer special programs for teenagers at risk that was quickly funded in full by an anonymous donor, identified only as “the man from Minneapolis” who only asked that the program be named after Annie G. Freeman.

Tom’s brother, an English teacher from a small college in the Midwest, spent a week helping Laura and Tom move in and unpack and by the end of the week had spent most of his time trying to seduce Rebecca who was just as smitten as he was. He made it into the bedroom on the last night, sent her a plane ticket for a weekend visit, and at this very moment is flying back to visit her for the third weekend in a row.

Rebecca, happy to the point of making everyone—including her new neighbors—nauseous with the romantic turn of events in her life, threw herself off the cliff of love and also managed to design several new marketing programs for her office that made them forget all of the time she had taken off to care for her dying relatives and to go on a traveling funeral that was now and forever part of the legend of Sonoma County.

Laura and Tom never locked their doors, Rebecca never locked hers and as her neighbors gradually turned Annie’s house into their own, a wonderful synergy of give and take, a kind of communal living that made way for the traveling brother, Annie’s boys—who are really men—and Marden, Rebecca’s daughter, began to unfold and new stories and parties and memories were formed before the boxes were even unpacked.

Balinda called not long after Laura and Tom’s old house sold to a family from Poland, who took over not only her yard to plant a garden but half of her mother’s life as well, to tell Laura that her daughter had just pulled up in a convertible looking for her.

“I gave her your new address and she said to give you a call and let you know she’d be there in a few days unless she found an interesting side road that she needed to explore,” Balinda told her.

The wayward daughter, Erin, who was really a fairly successful web designer who simply had the blood of a gypsy inside of her and could do business from the back of her car, a gas station bathroom or an eighty-nine-story building, did show up at Laura’s new home but it took her nine weeks to get there. She stayed for a very long time, which for her was more than two weeks, and when Annie’s son Donan came for a visit, the two hit it off like only opposites can.

Donan, who drove a restored Dodge van and dressed like the world’s stereotypical image of a computer geek—button-down shirts, actually buttoned to the throat, khakis and loafers—loved the creative flow that he harnessed with Erin’s laughter and he offered to partner with her in a business that would allow her to live exactly how she wanted to live. She agreed but only if a certain percentage of their work was pro bono and if they did not accept work from ultraconservative groups or anyone who had ever spoken to, voted for or said one good thing about President George W. Bush. He reluctantly agreed and within three months the two of them—Donan, from downtown San Francisco, and the wayward daughter, when last heard from in an adobe cottage in southern Utah—were on the verge of becoming widely successful.

Balinda was beside herself with more than the good news about what she called “her new world.” Something remarkable had happened to her mother in the assisted living facility. She was not only speaking entire sentences in English, she had three new and very fine women friends and was proclaimed well enough—well, sort of well enough—to move back home if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to.

“My mother wants to stay where she is and she wants to go to Poland before she dies, not after she dies,” Balinda told them. “Will you all still go?”

They did.

This time they extended the Poland trip to lovers, kids, boy-friends and husbands because they had so many free tickets and a place to stay with about five thousand Chalwaski relatives. Fourteen of them flew to Poland and they had so much fun they almost got kicked out of the country. They toured, danced in the streets, drank homemade beer and wine, went hiking, and watched Jencitia Chalwaski’s eyes light up and nearly set the country on fire when she saw friends, relatives and a place that she had held in her heart and memory for a very long time. She could never travel after that but it did not matter to her because she had been home.

Balinda started to date again after she joined a dancing theater troupe, a decision which pretty much came out of nowhere, because she didn’t even know she wanted to dance. At last count, she had tap-danced her way into the hearts of four men and two women, but she had decided to keep her tap shoes, so far anyway, under the beds of only the men. She was also in the midst of a nationwide search for the sexy man of her dreams.

Jill’s life was never and would never be the same following the traveling funeral. She barely had time to sit on the back porch and mope, and feeling sorry for herself was never an idea that entered her mind. Melissa—the waitress from New Mexico—and her family, with the help of maps, gas money and no clear picture of what to expect when they left Bernahillo, came for a visit. Melissa fell in love with the campus the second they pulled into the parking lot at the university and got a job at a swanky local restaurant about twenty minutes after that and traded in her cowboy boots for Birkenstocks.

The quiet house on the edge of town quickly became a thriving center of action and life, the likes of which Jill also saw a lot of on her own side of the house. The classy bartender from New York, Nina, called her and just happened to be a two-time author and a therapist who loved interacting with people as a bartender because they did not have a clue what she did to pay her mortgage. They corresponded. They stayed up all night talking on the phone. They flirted like mad just like they did the night at the bar when they stayed at the hotel in New York and then Nina, without telling Jill, hopped on an airplane and showed up on her very doorstep, just like in the movies, with flowers, champagne and the most unbelievably beautiful smile Jill had ever seen in her life.

Katherine went back home, made sure her daughter’s grades were still good and the flowers were watered, and very quickly downsized her entire life. She told her boyfriend, who really wasn’t that bad, that she needed a break, put the house that she had slaved to buy, remodel and finance on the market, and found a very small, two-bedroom home right in the heart of the city but close enough so that her daughter could finish her last year of high school with the friends and teachers she knew and cared for.

Two months after moving, Katherine literally bumped into a woman in her courtroom who was rushing to file papers for an addition onto her restaurant. The women talked for twenty minutes, Katherine accepted a dinner invitation, confessed over a bottle of fine red wine that she had always wanted to learn how to cook at a “real joint,” and became a part-time apprentice to one of the finest chefs in California. After figuring and refiguring her finances she was able to quit her assistant district attorney position with a small pension and work full-time (and then some) at the restaurant with the hope that her daughter would get some big-ass scholarship to pay her way through college. She loved her new life so much she sometimes cried on the way to work because she was so damn happy.

Marie kept her job as the hospice nurse because she could not imagine her life without the Annies and Willards who depended on her to ease their final days and to do what was right—no matter what the rules said. Her experience with the traveling funeral helped her develop a series of workshops, which she called celebrations, to help people with issues of death and dying and to engage in discussions with family members who were terminally ill and wanted to plan their own funerals before they died.

Her husband surprised her by building her a beautiful cabin on the back side of their property so that she could hold her workshops there and so she could have a place to mentally detox without a ringing phone, the pounding feet of her family or the distractions of a world that she needed to put on pause after her terribly emotional days and nights. He planted a tree outside of the window he was certain she would sit near and made a family rule that no one could go inside the cabin unless they were invited.

Then Marie drove to the Harley dealership, signed up for a class, and started shopping for a used bike that she dreamed would carry her into the wind, past twelve clients’ homes and into a world where she could catch every dream she’d ever had. She also began taking regular days off, was rumored to have actually used one sick day, and is now planning a trip with the entire family to Annie’s family home on Lake Superior.

It took the women a year to finalize plans for the last leg of Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral. All of the women, except Balinda who had a very large role in a small play, flew to Seattle on a Friday afternoon. They followed Annie’s directions right down to the rental of a red van, picking up the six
P.M.
ferry to Bainbridge Island, and just waiting at the dock for a nice woman who would have them follow her to a cabin on Little Manzanita Bay.

This cabin was a world away from new loves and old dreams and the ever-quickening pace that they had all fallen into following their return a year ago from the wild days and nights flying from one end of the country to the other with Annie’s ashes. When the five women got off the boat and met the woman on the dock she laughed out loud to see them in their red high-tops and bandanas and said, “This makes total sense” as she whisked them off to the cabin by the sea.

They had two nights and a day to figure it out but it didn’t take that long. Annie’s last note to them had stayed inside of the red tennis shoes for all the months when the box had been tucked away inside of Katherine’s underwear drawer. They had their glasses of wine on the long deck with their feet up, tennies pointed toward the water, when Katherine pulled out the final note and read it.

Just pause and remember. I came here several times just to do that, and to feel that salty air on my face, to be by my water, to just sit down and let the world I live in pass right through me. It was an important lesson. I should have done it more. Just pause, my loves, remember me, and then keep going. Love, Your Annie.

The next evening they each dipped their fingers into the ashes and cupped them in their hands and then they went in five separate directions. They did not plan anything after that, they did not time the release of what was left of Annie, they did not sing or toast or cry, but anyone watching, anyone hovering above the bay would have seen a swirl of ashes, tiny particles of matter, released at the exact same moment by the beautiful fingers of five of the most wonderful women ever created. Annie’s friends, her female family, the women she loved, tossed her ashes into the summer wind, they each caught a sob in the back of their throats, and then each, in her own special way, said goodbye.

Later, Katherine threw her old Bali bra into the fire they made on the beach and they relived every moment of Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral and her totally fabulous and ever-present life, and they did exactly what Annie would have wanted them to do: they paused and then they kept on going.