I officiated my first funeral when I was 10 years old. It was for my dead cat, Thisbe, who belonged to my parents when they first married eighteen years earlier. He slept on the heater his last few days as we gathered around to pet him and remind him that when you're that old, it's okay to go... Twenty-one years later I officiated my second funeral for my dead uncle who drank himself to sleep alone in a car in the middle of the day in the middle of his life before he had even reached an age that could be described as old.
My two sisters, three neighbors and our other cat Jellicle attended Thisbe's service which began with a procession around the house and grounds with five children dressed in black pulling a red wagon holding a dead cat wrapped in two paper grocery bags and a small black cat lurking behind. At the grave site (an illegal hole in the ground in our back yard alongside the neighbor's fence), I presided over the liturgy to the congregation of four (plus our parents), we lowered Thisbe into the ground, and everyone threw some dirt on top of him before my father finished with the shovel.
My uncle's three teenage children attended his funeral in the hot Arizona desert, and only one of them cried. The other two sat there stone-faced and angry at their lot in life: an alcoholic father and a gene pool of mental illness. There was no procession to the grave sight, only an urn in the middle of some flowers my aunt's friends had purchased that reflected more my aunt's beauty that tried just as hard to wrap around my uncle, but the urn was unsteady and felt just as out of place as he did. A few months later the ashes processed to Missouri where we're all from, but I was back in Arkansas by then and couldn't afford another plane ticket home.
