I Attended My Own Funeral

Flower Of The Living

They left me alone at 2 a.m.

That was their first mistake.

The night nurse did her rounds, checked my monitors, adjusted the drip, and settled back at the station down the hall. I lay still for four hours. Thinking. Planning. Talking myself out of it and back into it again.

I needed to see it for myself.

The IV came out first. It hurt more than I wanted — a bright sting as I pressed my elbow hard against the mattress. The pulse oximeter I slid onto the bed rail instead of disconnecting, let it read the metal, let it think I was still there.

My clothes were gone. In the cabinet I found discharge clothes — gray sweatpants, a hospital shirt two sizes too large, foam slippers that whispered against the linoleum. I dressed in the dark. Every movement cost me something. But I dressed.

I walked out.

The church was four blocks away.

I knew this from the broadcast. I had memorized the street sign the way a drowning person memorizes the distance to shore. I walked with my head down, one hand pressed to my ribs, and didn't stop until I turned onto Aldren Street.

The church was lit.

Not modestly — fully. Every window glowing amber, the front steps washed in warm gold uplighting that hadn't existed in any photograph of this building I'd ever seen. Floral displays framed the entrance in cascading white. Lilies and ranunculus and trailing greenery that caught the light like wet silk.

My flowers. My specific, particular favorites that I had never named to anyone except Adrian.

I stood on the opposite pavement and could not move.

People moved inside the stained glass. Mourners in a space designed to hold grief. And for one completely untethered moment, I understood what it meant to be dead to the world while still breathing inside it.

I crossed the street without deciding to.

The side door was unlocked. I pressed through it into warm candlelight, and the smell hit me — lilies and beeswax, too many people breathing the same air. I pressed my back against the stone wall and looked out at the nave.

Full. Nearly full.

I recognized faces. A college roommate. A former colleague. My sister in the front row with her shoulders curved inward — the posture of someone making themselves small so grief can't find all of them. Her husband's arm was around her.

She wasn't leaning into it.

The coffin was at the altar.

White. Closed. Ringed in lilies so thick their scent had weight. And on top, a single framed photograph. My face, looking back at myself from thirty feet away, smiling at something just off-camera.

I remembered that day. A Sunday in April. Adrian had made breakfast, light coming through the kitchen window at that particular morning angle that makes everything look painted. He had picked up his phone and said don't move and I hadn't.

He had chosen that photograph out of every photograph that existed of me.

The thought cracked something open in my chest.

Then I saw him.

Adrian stood to the right of the altar, slightly apart from the other mourners — people unconsciously give space to someone whose grief is too large to approach. Dark suit, jacket gone, shirtsleeves pushed to the elbows the way he always did when he was holding something together through will alone. Hands at his sides. Eyes on the coffin.

He had not arranged his face for anyone. No performance, no careful management. This was the version of Adrian that existed when he believed no one who mattered was watching.

He looked destroyed.

He took three steps forward. Stopped. Pressed one hand flat against the lid of the coffin — the same gesture he'd made on the broadcast, the same one he made whenever something cut too deep — and the gesture was so entirely, completely him that my vision blurred before I could stop it.

His shoulders dropped.

And then Adrian Hale broke.

Not loudly. Not theatrically. He bent forward with his forehead nearly touching the wood and made a sound I felt rather than heard. It traveled across the nave and through the stone wall and into the c***k already in my ribs.

My hand found the side door.

I did not know if I was about to run to him or run away.