SO LITTLE changed after my grandfather passed away that my family had trouble remembering that he was dead. One sunny Brooklyn day, my sister and our cousin Marissa were walking down the street in Park Slope and my sister casually referred to his death. Marissa looked at my sister with eyes big as saucers.
“Grandpa’s dead?” she shrieked, clutching my sister’s shoulder and swaying with dramatic flair.
“Mars, he’s been dead over a year.”
Maybe they had trouble remembering because we didn’t have a funeral or a wake or any of the regalia that accompanies a Death in the Family. I had always thought that everyone got a funeral. I imagined that when you died, someone, maybe the government, bought you a lacquered coffin and rented space at a funeral home for the wake, and that burial plots were public
