I’d been to funerals before. The first one was my mom’s. That was just indescribable. Terrible. There’s this thing people say about the first death that you experience, the first death of someone you actually know. “After the first death there is no other,” and it means that once someone you know dies and death becomes real like that, in that visceral way, no other death can touch that one. Because it’s like people, before that fist person that matters to them dies, they don’t get death. You might think you do, it makes some sort of cerebral sense. But until that person is cut out of your life like a paper doll out of a book, you can’t really know it.

It was worse for me. I was young, you know, 11. But the first death was my mom. That person who was like there before me, who was supposed to always be there. That person who was the world for me, for a time. She got sick. Then she just kept getting sicker. But I never thought she’d die. It was like I couldn’t face it, couldn’t face life without her.

It’s funny about that kind of stuff. Whether you can face it or not it happens. I felt totally unprepared for her death. My dad wasn’t being all that comforting. She was out of his life already so it was like it didn’t matter to him. But she wasn’t out of my life. She was still my mother. I couldn’t talk about her around him. I tried. He’d just stare through me or he’d get that angry look. I tried very hard not to cause him to have that angry look. With my dad I was always learning what not to do. I learned pretty quickly not to mention her. Sometimes it would slip out, some memory I had of her, something like that. But I’d stop myself pretty quick.

Then my dad dies. This was altogether different from when my mom died. With my mom it was all sadness and grief and asking why and wondering how I could live without her. But with my dad there was relief. And I’d already lived without him for almost all of grade nine. I talked to him on the phone a few times. I’d seen him a couple of times. That was it for all of grade nine. I was living without him already. And it was better. I wasn’t getting hit all the time, I wasn’t watching everything I said and did. I wasn’t feeling like such a terrible kid. Living with Joey I was starting to realize it wasn’t my fault that he had hit me. It wasn’t really anything I did because I did stuff at Joey’s. I took his car off the car lot without asking and he didn’t hit me.

It just wasn’t as easy, in a way, when my dad died. I didn’t know how to feel. Sad because my dad died and I had loved him, in some way? Or relief because I wouldn’t have to worry about moving back in with him and having the same old thing happen again? Or guilt because I’d wished I’d never have to see him again? It was too confusing. I didn’t want to feel any of it. I wanted to go on with my life like it hadn’t even happened. I wanted to go to school and go to that end of the year dance and flirt with Ashley and all of that. My dad was screwing things up for me again.

I mean, how did people expect me to feel? Everyone was giving me that worried, concerned look, asking how I was. ‘How are you? How are you?’ That’s all I was hearing and I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t know how I was. Sometimes I felt fine, really honestly fine. Sometimes I didn’t.

The funeral. It was worse, in some ways, than my mom’s. Both my parents were dead. This was a sobering thought. I was 14. 14! Shit, and both my parents were dead. I was sitting next to Joey and I realized he was the only parent I had left, a step-father. I knew he really cared about me and all and I cared about him but could he replace them? Both of them? I didn’t know.

It was all over. My dad was gone. All the expectations he’d had for me, it had all burned up in that car crash. All his violence and his ways of making me feel so worthless, it had all gone with him. But it hadn’t, not really. It was in me. I’d felt it this whole year even though I’d hardly spoken to him, hardly seen him at all. Every day I felt his influence. Almost all of my actions were colored by it. My resentment of authority and the simultaneous feeling of wanting to please authority. My flinching away from quick or unexpected movements. My second guessing Joey’s moods and behavior. And it wouldn’t end there, probably.

I looked at the coffin and couldn’t believe it. With my dad it was simple disbelief. How could he be dead? How could this be possible when we’d just studied science? I’d just been over his house, he couldn’t be dead. He wasn’t in a hospital bed for months like my mother. He didn’t waste away. He was just gone so suddenly that I could hardly believe it.