I remember bits of my father’s funeral. My memory of it was recorded through eyes of a child. What I remember most vividly of the event was how mournfully boring it was. He died at fifty-six from lung cancer, and the ceremony had nothing to do with his fifty-six years of achievements.
Instead of a private funeral, my uncle and aunts turned it into a semi social event. None of the people invited posed sentiments of being friends of my father's. I had requested that we had a traditional Chinese ceremony and that everyone dressed in white. That morning guests arrived in dark suits, except one man who donned white by cultural default.
There was a procession of a wide green carpet, stained by the fluid remains of previous ceremonies. There were flowers, too much of it. They were ugly and fragrantless flowers. The seats in disarray, were portable folding chairs made from icy cold steel. There was incense, not enough of it. My father was in the back of the room; behind a withering alter that held his photo and the singular incense. He was wrapped burrito style in a white cloth with a big cross at its center. It felt like we were Chinese Buddhists, but abruptly converted to Christianity. I stood there and resisted it all. This was not how I wanted my father to leave me. Not by cancer, not without warning, not without comprehension and not without a decent funeral.
Before the ceremony began, all relatives stood around his sleeping body. The priest held his Bible and prayed in Cantonese. As the air conditioning roared, my father’s hair softly brushed his powdered forehead to the rhythm of religious verses. He was not Christian. I wondered why he was in this sleeping bag, why they had not bothered to dress him. My father looked on from his shut eyelids in peaceful slumber. If I had reached out that day and touched him, he would have woken to the ugliness of his own funeral. He somehow did not seem like he was gone.
The tears, soiled tissues, sobs, comforting pats reverberated a world that is rapidly becoming apart of the past. We all shed different tears. Mine was the regret that my father lived a lonely life, friendless and loveless, with even less happiness. This was our greatest lost.
The day before the funeral my mother and I came to visit the venue. He was confined upstairs in a private hall that looked the miniature replica of the funeral hall. I was frightened to see the body of my late father. I cried and scream. I had never been in the presence of anyone dead. My father was the last person I wish to witness first. He was the last person that should have died first. His funeral should have been the last for me to attend, but it was my first. My father was suppose to be alive when I graduated from an Ivy League, he was suppose to be alive when I put on a big white dress and married Prince William, he was suppose to be alive when I saved the world!
My mother comforted me and somehow I found myself in the room. My father laid in silence; his chest lacked the rise and fall of livelihood. I was overtaken by a violent storm of uncontrollable sorrow. My tall, handsome, suave father was a caterpillar in a Christ cocoon. Wistfully, memories of the times we walked together down the streets of Kowloon settled upon my small being. I was a child, always needing to crane my neck to get a glimpse of my father. He would powerfully guide me through the streets of Hong Kong or Shanghai. I was so incredibly young; my thoughts were still uncluttered with maturity. Now, with a light degree of age, I know how my father must have felt as he strolled in silence through hours upon hours with his only child from a failed marriage. We had a relationship with few words but many feelings. We were content holding hands in the crowds; there was no word in any language that could have clearly shown our affections. The day before the funeral was the first time I had to lower my eye level to look at my father who was more helpless than I had ever been small in size. And that same hand I held would soon become a fistful of ashes.
From the funeral hall we had to transport his body and a busload of people to the crematorium. Each of us was given a white rose to place atop his coffin. I was first to place my rose on the smooth glossy surface of mahogany, and I remember thinking that this will be as close I can ever be to my father for the last time. I was given the “honor” of switching on the rotary belt that carried his body into the flames. Everyone present was starving and hungrily watched me slowly and hesitantly fulfill my daunting task. It was when he was swallowed by fire that it hit me: my father is dead.
After that, my uncle and aunts kept me from my father’s estates. I was denied the privilege of the fading deceased. No tokens of remembrance, no pieces of furniture, no remaining photographs. I was the forgotten niece who, on that day, dies with the younger brother. And I never spoke to any of them since.
I had expected my father live pass the day I learned to communicate so we may fill the void. We could have strolled down the same sultry streets and he could have said more to me in his smoky voice and I would have replied. That never happened and the further I move in time his memory continues to recede into the past. All I can see was how incredibly young my father’s daughter was.
My father loved in his own way. His mother was a Shanghainese Opera singer under the starlight of local fame. She married a wealthy man who already had a few wives. Together they gave birth to five children, my father being the fifth. During grandmother’s fifth pregnancy, her husband decided to marry again, this time a younger woman. In turbulent disappointment, my grandmother left, taking with her all five children. When my father was born, he was completely fatherless. With no examples to live by, he made due what he could from across the Pacific. He would send me small notes, cards, artwork, stamps and sequined flowers while I studied in the States. Letters in cryptic Chinese characters accompanied all the little surprises. My mother read them to me, I would place it on my desk and somehow they disappeared. It was after all a small note, something I received often and something I expected forever bountiful.
I am piecing together my incomplete father. The saddest memory I own of him was the last time I visited his apartment. His home smelled of conditioned storage and mothballs. He was wearing a white polo shirt tucked into his belted trousers. Holding a quarter full one-liter coke bottle, he took a gulp from it. My father lived alone and does not use cups, utensils or china that belongs to him. I was too young to have realized that he was severely lacking love. I secretly forgave him for my mother, who’s soul is still in shatter pieces from a ruined marriage, then I decided to locked away all of my affections until one day when I became older.
Now all I have is the resurfacing of all my childhood secrets and hidden emotions. I want to write him a letter of confession and either put it in a bottle then hurl it into the sea or tie it to a helium balloon and release it into the sky. Through the thick storm of the waters and rough currents of the air, my message would reach him unharmed as he continued to sleep a breathless sleep beneath the twilight of eternity…peacefully several worlds away.
