Aunt Alvina’s sons and daughters and the spouses of her sons and daughters were assigned the choir loft for solidarity as they wept while remembering and roiling with feeling and trying not to, or not too much, to avoid entering the void without end while on display, next of kin. I arrived with my stepson and daughter. My husband brought his father, Aunt Alvina’s brother, having first gone to the assisted living to shave and dress him. Then he’d wheeled him to the pickup, lifted him in, collapsed the wheelchair, and he drove seventy miles to the church where he put his father back in the wheelchair and brought him inside to see, first, a table with mementos, including an old news story about the Agricultural Association award Aunt Alvina once won for her hens. In the photo, she smiles while driving a tractor, the story a record of her unforced joy at the cycle of sowing, growing, reaping, and then the dormant stillness of winter when, on a farm, you wait: renewal.

Next my husband wheeled his father to the coffin to be near the body. Some death rituals emphasize proximity to the body. So peaceful, people say. Inert, I say. In the old days, there was no avoiding the body. People died at home. People who knew them washed and dressed the bodies. A body helps you know it’s no longer the person you loved or feared or blinked back anger at. The body is the site of memories already fading, and soon you remember only having remembered, and the person slips away, a changing idea.

Grieving means carrying a burden, and the idea that grief will go away and stay away is new. Closure once meant wall. Then it became a word to describe the end of conflict or the end of a poem or symphony. According to Google Books Ngram viewer, an online tool that graphs the rate of a phrase’s appearance over time, closure to grief first appeared in print in 1982, then became commonplace. In 1982, I was a few years older than students I taught in Freshman English, and our textbook had themed units of short readings to inspire paper topic ideas, and one unit called Death & Dying included Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” which students hated, too nebulous, and an excerpt from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book about stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), which they loved as if I’d given them a study guide to help them ace the final.

Back then I was a death-virgin, but I scoffed, all the same.  Don’t expect a grief manual, I might have said. Grief is surely mysterious, each experience unique, closure an aspiration only. Maybe I shivered aesthetic chills. Death as class discussion was exciting. Séances at slumber parties used to be. It’s all tingling theory when you’re young, death an altered state. My stipulations turn out to be true. I aim for closure anyway, to begin to understand precise ways that feeling bereft, which means having been robbed, will go on forever.

I live in a city but I’ve so far had all my death experiences in small towns, where funeral directors often know the dead person and loved ones, lives lived before and after, who on the list of survivors fared better or worse. A small town funeral director sees that grief isn’t one grief but a confluence, old griefs sluicing into new griefs, many griefs merged.

My mother died in a small town. She was widowed three years and newly remarried. Her second husband of twenty years had died, and she’d moved to marry this third husband, also widowed. They’d been in love and hurried to marry because “death do you part” was a deadline. Her out-of-the-blue dying months later came too soon for me, too soon for my sister in a different way, and too soon for the husband, who seemed inflamed, in mutiny at this new levy, another death, another reason to hate his first wife’s dying.

My mother’s husband made a bleak joke to the funeral director: “What about a discount for repeat customers?” Then left the room and cried robustly. Next, he came back and worried aloud that since my sister and I didn’t know his family members, arriving with cakes and casseroles, we’d feel worse. But my mother’s funeral had to be somewhere.

This family was good at gathering. When my own family gathered, no matter each individual’s serene intention, a fracas befell. For instance, at my brother’s wedding, my dad fell down due to drinking, car keys flying into the snow. I saw them land and grabbed them. Car keys in snow are no joke at night, limited visibility. My stepmother, who was still my dad’s girlfriend then, had been upset for hours because—in deference to my mother, who’d hoped my dad’s girlfriend wouldn’t attend the wedding, but my dad insisted—someone asked my stepmother to step aside during a family photo. I realize she felt excluded. She thought I wanted the keys to be high-handed. She slapped me and took them.

These run-ins aren’t one person’s fault. We start with small talk about happy or funny shared memories because that’s what we have in common. This restarts old ways of interacting, and surprise, the bad chemistry, the explosion. I bow out of most family gatherings.

For my own Kodak moments, like my daughter’s naming ceremony or my wedding to a good man when I was middle-aged, I have small celebrations and send announcements later. I’ve sometimes invited my sister, but word gets out and they all arrive, jolly until miffed. So I was relieved my mother died in a far-off place among people who weren’t sad for her because they didn’t know her but sad because they loved her husband, who was sad. My sister and I were sad. So were well-mannered aunts and uncles, my mother’s best siblings, arriving in rental cars from the airport a hundred miles away.

My mother’s husband told the funeral director to defer to my sister and me, our desires. So, at a rite I’d never heard of, a prayer vigil at which the coffin stays closed, not to be opened until the funeral two days later, a rite apparently always on the slate when someone in my mother’s new family died, the funeral director took my sister and me aside to say that, due to the prednisone with which doctors tried to save our mother’s life, her body was deteriorating quickly. He’d tried every mortuary science technique. He suggested a closed-coffin funeral and those who wanted should see the body soon, in private.

After the vigil, we sipped coffee and ate cookies. No one wanted to see the body except my uncle. Everyone else said: “I’ll recall her as she was.” The funeral director, a source of expertise, stood near me.  I murmured that I’d had a boyfriend who died and I never went to his funeral. I stopped before adding that our relationship ended before he died, none of the hyped closure, just shrieking and insisting on my part and what we now call stalking on his part. His mother found me and called, hysterical. For years I dreamed about him, twenty-something, tuning an electric guitar, clicking through lines of coke, voicing his grudging approval as I became a graduate student, an author, a professor, a mother.

The funeral director said if I had a glimmer of an urge to see my mother I should.

People have regrets about deaths in the past, he added.

In the material realm, these recurring dreams about the dead must be long-term memories stored in your brain mixing with recent memories from a different emotional index, old memories binding with new, and you’re forced to reconsider the old in light of the new and vice versa. Like I wished my dead mother knew my baby daughter longer, and I found my mother in a room in my house that’s also a room in her new husband’s house and also a room in the house where she grew up, my grandparents’ house, so three rooms fused. My mother, holding my daughter, is not alive. But she has a body. Not for long, she says. It’s spongy. She says to touch her arm, see? The brain has no choice but to blend new information and old information and tell a story, making the dead into minor characters. But if you believe in the unverifiable, dreams are a communiqué from far-off exile.

At the viewing of my mother’s body in a small room, I felt nothing. She’d been changed by the prednisone. She was no one I’d met. She was too big. And beauticians who arrive at odd hours, working from photos, get it wrong. But the fingertips were hers. Fingernails press down and contain the swelling. As a child, in church or at a concert, during sermons or music, I’d loved my mother’s hands, translucently thin skin due to housework, smooth due to her almond-scented hand cream. I’d trace the veins, the knuckles, the oval nailbeds. After a few minutes, my uncle sighed. “Yes, that’s her,” he said.

*********

My husband steered my father-in-law’s wheelchair back to our pew at Aunt Alvina’s funeral, only two weeks after his own mother’s funeral. During Aunt Alvina’s, my father-in-law would have preferred to obey the unwritten ban against public displays of grief. But he couldn’t stop himself from crying harder than Aunt Alvina’s sons and daughters, nearer next of kin. At his wife’s funeral, just two weeks earlier, he’d braced himself, stoic. Now he was like my mother’s husband: a death for which he’d prepared and then another, no warning, the second time like rain falling on rivers already swollen, cresting.

Aunt Alvina, age eighty-seven, had lived alone, playing cards every Wednesday with her friends who hadn’t yet died. “Oh the fun,” she’d said once. “We laugh and laugh.” Then she fell, and EMS took her to the hospital. Pain management usually works, though it muddies last words. It failed Aunt Alvina, who begged to die to end pain, her daughter said. Hours of pain. A day, two days. She died. My mother-in-law’s dying took longer.

My husband had sat with his father at his mother’s deathbed on and off for weeks as she sometimes spoke before slipping back into a state like sleep. When she died, my husband began to plan the viewing, the funeral, gravesite prayers at the cemetery miles from town, and a reception at a nearby hall. He asked for my help choosing food, flowers, clothes.

At my mother-in-law’s viewing, a tiny fracas befell. I’d told the small-town funeral director I didn’t know what to do with the two corsages that came with the florist’s package I’d ordered, and he explained that female next of kin and female dead wear them. As people arrived to show the dead person was known and loved, a woman who’d once been hired to help cook for my husband’s parents when they got too frail brought another corsage she’d hoped to pin on my mother-in-law in her coffin. This woman was “not well,” as the funeral director later put it. When she saw I’d already pinned a corsage on my mother-in-law’s pink lapel, she shoved me. I felt startled in my black dress, shoes I’d polished, nylons I got at a grocery store, hoping to look right, to blend. She shouted I wasn’t a real daughter-in-law because I hadn’t been married long enough. This all felt vaguely usual to me except that kind people closed ranks, restoring calm.

Next, the funeral. Before it started, we were put in the choir loft: my husband, me, our children; my father-in-law; Aunt Alvina; and my mother-in-law’s twin sister, Aunt Gladys, a recluse. The choir loft was for our distinction, immediate family. During the funeral, because our group was small, we sat in the front pew. Next, the gravesite. A hot wind blew across fields, whipping the canopy, sun shade the funeral director erected over folding chairs. This final rite—prayers and symbolic fistfuls of soil—was attended only by us and really old people, silent and still, as the roaring wind seemed to lift and rend the canopy.

Then we went to a hall to eat ham sandwiches and apple crumble. Friends and relations asked: How old was my daughter? My stepson? What subjects did each one like in school? They approved my answers, good answers, good children gleaming nearby, my daughter in a dress I’d just bought, my stepson in a new shirt, clothes they’d wear a few weeks later to Aunt Alvina’s funeral but we didn’t know yet. This was their first funeral, and they’d slipped out of their real ages, pre-teen and teen, to be solemn and helpful.

The crowd thinned, and my father-in-law said he didn’t know what to think about now, if not his wife. Aunt Alvina, in the dress she’d wear in her coffin a few weeks later, but we didn’t know, told him to assent to grief. She understood this season, its weather. One of my husband’s uncles had quit attending funerals altogether, too many now, he’d said.

Weeks later at Aunt Alvina’s funeral, my father-in-law said, “I don’t understand.” The new death, he meant, its timing. Tributary grief. He cried so hard that Aunt Alvina’s daughter-in-law in the choir loft noticed and cried with him. People cry by contagion due to visuospatial neurons, mirror neurons that reflect social cues: they were born with hair-trigger neurons or grew up in chaos and developed them to detect signs of others’ mood swings.

Emotional contagion is a crude form of empathy. The sight of someone crying accesses the second crier’s warehouse of memories. I started crying with my father-in-law and Aunt Alvina’s daughter-in-law. Sitting next to me, my daughter watched, confused, because I’d quashed impulses to cry at my mother-in-law’s funeral, though I knew her better. My daughter had also seen my father-in-law cry less at his wife’s funeral than he cried now. I cried more with him, in concert. My husband avoided looking at us because he tries never to cry. If I correctly interpreted glances from Aunt Alvina’s sons and daughters in the choir loft, they saw my crying as proof I’d been a daughter-in-law long enough. They thought I cared about my father-in-law. I did. And I cast about for something dully pedestrian to think about so I’d stop crying at the funeral of a nice aunt by marriage.

Reasons for not crying in public are tacit, uncodified. Raw emotion disturbs the group, true. Seeing someone cry or yell at work or a party gives us pause. But someone yelling in public—lashing out—seems better tolerated than crying. Because yelling is maybe seen as out-of-control but not weak? Crying is abject. Since public crying is rare, there’s no etiquette for responding. Tolerant body language? A no-information remark affirming the social contract? People who witness crying also worry it’s a jealous bid for attention. The Greek city-state forbade crying. A man couldn’t soldier while also weeping. Crying women were bad PR. Stoicism means defeating emotion for the greater good.

Some cultures encourage public grief, allowing that, even before biochemistry proved this, crying can help, releasing stress hormones, also allowing for the fact that crying en masse, like celebrating en masse, is the occasional expression of an emotion, that, once expressed, won’t derail the collective. Discouragement of public grief seems rooted in fear of contagion, the barely articulated idea that if one of us cries then all of us might, crying too hard and long, unable to work, raise our children, cook, clean, repair, endure.

During the days before my mother’s funeral, many of us didn’t know much about each other besides our professions. One of my mother’s new husband’s daughters, watching my sister and I arrange our mother’s funeral, (she’d not long ago helped arrange her own mother’s) suggested I, a writer, should write and deliver the eulogy. My sister agreed. I wrote a carefully partial account of my mother’s life: warm generalizations followed by warm examples, nothing woeful or grim to alarm the family into which she’d married.

I was out-of-body, watching myself read while staring at people’s foreheads to create the illusion of eye contact. I fended off vagrant memories. The tender look on her face when I’d read a poem I’d written for a grade-school pageant. Or when she’d yelled when I was seventeen on the verge of serious trouble. Or when she’d waved a sad and terrified goodbye from the end of her tether, her driveway. As the funeral ended, I was in front with the priest, recalling my mother once saying that family members shouldn’t be pallbearers, undue pressure, a rule from her childhood. I saw my brother across the church. He’d arrived the night before. A tear rolled off his nose as he reeled, hoisting the coffin.

But at the prayer vigil two nights before the funeral, I had no assigned role, no assigned seat. Packed in the middle—my new stepfather was well-liked and his extended family huge—I had the illusion I’d disappeared, anonymous. The best argument against public crying is that even if you bring tissues—if you have, is the crying premeditated?—they turn into messy pulp. Crying activates nasolacrimal glands. People near you cringe. Only my mother’s husband’s youngest daughter, who’d been a teenager and still at home when her mother died (so thinking about her mother and not mine), cried too. Later, my uncle asked unironically if I was sick. My aunt, in an immobility of austere remembering, hurried away. She believed, as my mother had, that public crying is a hygienic and moral hazard.

*********

My mother’s second husband’s funeral was also planned quickly. He had a heart attack in the car while she was driving, and she asked someone to call me to get on a plane to help with his funeral. My mother had married him twenty years earlier, and I hadn’t seen her in person in a long time, but we talked by phone. At work, I requested days off, and I asked a neighbor to feed my pets. Both my supervisor and neighbor asked me who died. Stepfather, I said. They paused—no auto-rejoinder—and expressed basic sympathy.

A few years after he died, when my mother died, conventional sympathy was consolingly true if cryptic, aspirational. Aspiration gets you through when you’re in shock. But conventional expressions of sympathy jarred when my stepfather died. “May good memories comfort you soon,” my neighbor said. “No good memories at all,” I answered. She looked startled. I’d sounded hostile, so I added, “No worries. I won’t need comfort.”

My neighbor said smoothly, “You were estranged.”

When my mother married this husband, I was a young adult, still moving around. The two of them moved, to a small town in Arizona filled with people from the North who were sick of snow. Abusive, he wanted no oversight—I mean my brother and sister who’d lived near and tried to save her. From then on until he died, my brother and sister saw my mother on odd afternoons carved out when she and her husband traveled north to visit his children. Twice I traveled by plane to see her, sleeping in their guest room. Both times, I cut the visits short due to safety concerns. Failing to secure hers, I fled. I saved myself.

I saw her at a family reunion once. He’d dropped her off, staying in the car as she lifted her overnight bag out of the trunk. He felt her siblings looked down on him. They did. At my grandfather’s funeral, my aunt said, he’d been mad my mother was focused on her father’s death and not on him. He’d yelled during the gravesite praying and stalked away. At the family reunion, my mother and I greeted each other. In an instant of looking at each other’s faces, I could see she regretted our lapsed in-person contact but felt this lapse was our private calamity, a secret to keep. My sister knew about the aborted visits because I’d called afterward, crying. My sister sometimes called me, crying. Even my sister didn’t quite know how little I’d seen my mother: the aborted visits; the one family reunion; and once my mother and this husband passed through a city where I lived, tense stopover.

My sister had been summoned to my mother’s second husband’s funeral too. We three sat in the front pew on one side and the husband’s four children on the other. The funeral director had asked how many next of kin, and I’d paused, uncertain. He quickly suggested two front pews: equally honorary but separate. My mother knew some of her husband’s children but not an out-of-contact daughter. One of the children led this daughter to the coffin. She looked at her father’s body, screamed, then fell to the floor. She implied ill of the dead. She made a fracas in front of the other attendees, most of them neighbors, who seemed surprised to learn my mother had children. “Daughters!”  one said, gape-mouthed. As the stepdaughter sobbed on the floor, my mother didn’t cry. All week she didn’t cry. She shivered and talked fast, flitting from one odd subject to another.

But the stepdaughter’s unhappiness set off a surge in me. I can’t remember how hard I tried not to cry. My mother poked me, stern yet droll: “Do you need to visit the Ladies?” Wanting to please her, I visited the Ladies. Then I came back and started anew. Her life, a big part of it, had been wasted by him. My life, a big part of it overlapping hers, had been wasted by him. She wasn’t so delusional to think I was crying for him. Maybe she decided I was crying out of terror about the finality of death.  She held my hand.

At his funeral, I cried for the lost years of my mother’s life when she did without, the lost years of mine when I did without, bereft before she even died. Three years later, during her funerary week, I thought how we’d have fared better if she’d had more time with the new husband. It was a genial if impersonal week with blanks to fill—typical behaviors and remarks for a typically grief-struck daughter—in front of a family I didn’t know, her new husband I didn’t know, but he seemed decent. So I thought at another small church, in another small town, at a prayer vigil two nights before her funeral, a ritual no one in our family knew. So I cried, hoping she wouldn’t mind. How implausible that she neither could nor couldn’t? I cried in front of people who recoiled at my crying while pried open. I cried for an hour. Then I fell in and never cried about her in public again.

*********

But grief valves, spillways, opened a few weeks later. I lived in a small town, and my neighbor died. Like my mother’s third husband’s first wife who preceded my mother in death by a few years (dying slowly whereas my mother died quickly), like my mother-in-law who preceded Aunt Alvina in death by a few weeks (dying slowly whereas Aunt Alvina died quickly), my neighbor Clara Mae had been sick for a year, and my mother was healthy one day and dead the next. A first death for which you fortify, then another, the ambush. Except the order was reversed: my by-ambush death first, my readied-for death next. I’d brought Clara Mae meatloaf and roasts and soup for a year. She wasn’t better, but she wasn’t worse until the phone rang. Then she was dead just after my mother was.

I sat in back at her funeral. I brought my briefcase instead of a purse because it was big enough for a slim box of tissues and potentially copious discards. I’d stop-and-start-cried since the phone call. Years later I told my husband about crying hard at Clara Mae’s funeral weeks after my mother’s and how, at its end, I’d hurried past her next of kin, and I’d waved, embarrassed, disheveled, wet, and heard a stranger say: “Is that a daughter?” My husband understood why I’d hurried. He described the funeral of a friend, a man with three girlfriends, none of whom meant to vie for status as most affected, but their piled-upon bewailing and sniffling increased the immediate family’s sadness and strain.

My husband and I were sitting at the kitchen table. Our light staved off nightfall. We ate hot soup, hot bread, winter fare. My husband recalled a funeral when he was ten, his grandmother on his mother’s side, and back in the day when women’s lives might fall out this way, she’d been a young mother when her husband sent her away to a mental institution after years of beating her into submission, maimed despair. My husband’s mother and her twin sister Gladys, born in 1926, swaddled together in a wicker basket, grew up without her. Her body came home to be buried, and every woman in the church sobbed while men looked away. “She’d been gone long already,” I said. My husband nodded.

Crying in private never lasts long. I think of tasks to complete while also crying, maybe cleaning baseboards, reorganizing a cabinet, grading papers, and the crying stops. But the impulse remains, small, tight, a whirling pocket covered by daily stillness and rushing. At Clara Mae’s funeral, a cascade overtook me. I wished to cry with strangers, though this would be onerous for people who dislike crying, not due to repression, but rare people don’t get the biochemical release and feel worse, not better, for having cried. We’d segregate, I decided, crying in distinct chambers, one for criers, one for stalwarts. I pictured a room in which we who wanted would unstop, convocation of sorrow, swarm of woe, pandemonium of laments, zeal for effusion, the dams opening, a mass grief-letting, letting.

*********

After Aunt Alvina’s funeral, I felt lightheaded from having cried. My father-in-law felt weak. My husband says we went to the reception after Aunt Alvina’s funeral, but I don’t remember. We’d have seen the same people we’d seen two weeks earlier at the reception after my mother-in-law’s, which I do remember. When I arrived at my mother-in-law’s funeral reception, I saw my husband, suitcoat cast aside, broad shoulders in a white shirt, smiling and nodding at people who waved hello as he carried his father to the wheelchair. My husband had a fever. We’d risen at dawn to get ready, to get the family ready, and he said he’d caught a bug, the long days at the hospital near his mother. A reception is refreshments and light conversation. The beloved is gone forever, yet people laugh and eat.

Because the hardest rites are over: the body at its viewing, familiar but strange; the body at church with emotive singing; the body lowering into the ground. I didn’t see my mother’s body into its grave. When the funeral was over, it had a train to catch. Her body was buried as per instructions from an old will, in a grave no one visits, in a town no one I know lives, in a plot bought by her cruel second husband. I sent her body off during a week of observances among strangers, observances that upheld me as I upheld them: structure against which I braced, my lack wider and deeper each time someone dies.

After my mother-in-law and Aunt Alvina died, Aunt Gladys died. We’d talked by phone on Sundays. She told me about shopping for food and cooking, and I told her news about the children. She left home a final time, carried on a stretcher, asking the EMS man to go back for her curlers and makeup. The uncle who’d objected to the proliferating monotony of funerals died. My father-in-law—barely anyone left to attend his funeral—died.

I haven’t deleted Aunt Gladys’s number from my contacts, and when I see it I think of her waiting for her squat, black phone to jangle alive. Last week I dreamed I was at a professional conference where, in waking life, I see people I’ve known for decades but I’ve lost track, and now and then a formerly well-known face emerges into focus in a blur of unknown faces on an escalator rolling the other way or in a crowd pushing the opposite direction. I see my mother in the crush. We need to talk because I have much to tell her, I think. Much, I mouth. Because she can’t hear. She smiles and waves and slips away.

I was still middle-aged when we arrived at my mother-in-law’s gravesite during a drought, a heat wave, the cornfields withering too soon. Old people in their best clothes sat in folding chairs under the canopy that whipped in hot wind. They wobbled to stand up and offer us their seats. My husband urged them to stay, but he wheeled my father-in-law under the canopy beside them. I held my husband’s fever-hot hand, and the children, death-novices, pressed near. I didn’t care about the propriety of crying or not-crying, but I stayed calm for them. Prayers began, and I watched the old people, their sere faces creased deep, each one of them remembering more griefs than I did yet, gleaming eyes impenetrable and mysterious over hidden, rapid, pooling, jammed-up, and unloosening grief.