A Familiar Stranger at a Funeral
- Rua Crozier-Khell
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
She leans her hand on the grey sandpaper wall, balancing out of her trainers and into black pumps. She only ever wears them to job interviews, and now funerals. Bending her leg awkwardly to do up the thin buckle on the ankle, she sees someone short and bouncy rush from the station, looking both ways down Middle Third. They acknowledge each other wordlessly and curiously, both knowing they are going to the same place, both wondering what the connection is. She’ll later wonder if his look of surprise was because she looked so familiar, despite how foreign she felt. She’d get used to that disconcerted look from people, the double take and then the second look that lasted a bit too long.
Today, she would be told again and again ‘Sure you’re the spit of your Da!’. She already knew her son looked just like Richie, a smaller version of the uncle he never got to meet. The way they hold a guitar, the serious and serene expression they both adopt, eyes on fingers on fret, getting it just right, the only important thing just now.
A year and a half later, she’d watch a man she’d poured all her love and loss into shift his eyes awkwardly and say, “You look just like him, you know”. He hoped it would help her see why he couldn’t love her back, not like that. Not the way she wanted. She couldn’t let go though and neither could he, pushing her away with words but keeping her close with his actions and his time, on his time. Closer and closer they clung, but never close enough for her. She’d let him mean too much.
Her stomach contracts as she sees the car pull up. She turns away from Killester Station and the Dart, all grey and green, and smiles at her cousin. So familiar, in the literal sense; they are so obviously family. Only in this moment though, does her whole ‘Dad’s side of the family’ become real, true, reachable, hers.
It hits her like a tidal wave then, taking her breath with it. It's too late. She will never reach him. He is gone. She is finally here, but her brother Richie is gone.
“It’s so nice to meet you, I wish it wasn’t like this”
All day she feels welcomed and recognised, her family can't help but smile at finally meeting her, despite the heavy sadness of the occasion. She feels eyes on her all day, curious and often gentle, sometimes suspicious.
“God you’re the spit of Peter”
“It was good of you to come”
“I loved your Da, do you know where he is now?” No.
“Do you hear from your Da?” No.
“Jaysus, you’re the image of Peter”
Usually said with love, sometimes pity, and once, with barely disguised spite.
Still, she feels yet again like an outsider, an intruder. Sitting near the front of the church with the family, as her cousin insisted, she feels like she has no right to be there. The tears that stream down her face are real though. The loss feels unbearable; this feeling of losing someone she never had but should have. Someone she should have been so close to. They shared so much and nothing at all. Similar strangers.
A familiar stranger now, she looks around at all this family, flesh and blood, who have been here all along. She’s missed so much, and now so much is missing. It is too late for her and her brother, and Dad remains unreachable – roaming the soup kitchens of West London. Close, but just out of reach to her, no matter how hard she searches.
She feels her heart hurt as she watches tears stream down her uncle’s cheeks, he looks fragile and old and not able for the heartbreak of it. Later, she fears he doesn’t want her there when he leaves Aunty’s house while they are all looking at photos. In her self-centred fear of rejection, she thinks he is walking away from her, disapproving of her appearance after all these years. Ten minutes later he returns with more photos to show her, of her dad as a teenager, of the block of flats they lived in together in the 70s on Ladbroke Grove. She shows him where her son goes to school now, just opposite the flats. They look at the beginnings of the big Sainsburys being built in the corner of the photo. When it is time to leave, she asks her cousin to wait a minute; she has to show her uncle something. She isn’t ready to leave him, she needs to connect one more time, just in case. She shows him a notebook of poems Dad wrote for Richie, he did love him. She hugs him goodbye, their cheekbones bump awkwardly, and she is so fearful of his mortality. Please let me see him again, she pleads. This can’t be all.
At the church she watches her brother’s girlfriend unable to stand, leaning against the wooden bench in front, her legs weak and wobbling. One cousin says a chunk of his childhood has been ripped out of him. Another nods and cries, “I know exactly what you mean”
She wishes she knew exactly what he means too. In a way she does, it feels like something has been ripped out. But she stands alone in her not-knowing, in her lacking, and in her emptiness. She is envious of that chunk of childhood that has been ripped from them. She will never know; she has missed so much. She feels alone in her undeserved grief, her unknowns, her what-ifs. She's grateful for their welcome, their folding her in. She feels lucky to be a part of it. She wishes for the security and sameness of having been there all along.
She notices him above everyone else coming out of the church literally, him being a foot taller than most. She instantly wants to know him, an almost immediate, inevitable attachment. He notices her too, later telling her he knew straight away who she was, “You look just like him you know”. He is tall, solid, safe, striking. His long hair braided into a Viking plait. He's soft too, his body and his eyes and his openness. His Dublin growl on a voice note the next day, the way he says, “when I saw you at the church there–”, has her instantly. They both need someone to grieve with, someone to feel closer to Richie with. But she pours so much more into it from the start, unable to differentiate.