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part 3: The funeral of my brother

melancholy |

2010-May-20 by Seth |

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okay, this one is gonna suck, ’cause I want to write about the hardest day of my life. April 21th in 2010.

I got asked why I write this blog entries about such a personal matter, and friends seem to get irritated if I have problems with attraction or something. If you thought I am only trying to get attention, well, shame on you. I have much lighter reasons to write this down:

first of all it is obviously very hard for me to talk about this. Especially I don’t want to tell everybody in person and repeat the same shit story again and again. I don’t want to go through this too often. So I thought write it down once and so can people who are interested in the story – I am thinking of friends who deserve to know about this – can simply read it up in my words. Second, I kinda need this for myself to cope with things better. To recap the whole situation helps me dealing. Plus I get this to record. And the third reason is that I don’t have anything against other people to read about it, IF they want to! There are people who are interested in such stories, and even though I believe none of them will read this, I welcome them. Reading about stuff like that helps anybody. It’s like watching a drama or so: you get to know about a topic and that helps you dealing with this particular topic in case it happens to you. So I kind of also think of the people this texts might help.

So, cut to the chase, let’s talk about me and my brother.

The funeral was an unspoken topic in our family. My parents couldn’t handle this topic for about nearly two weeks. Plus the whole police bureaucracy was busting our asses and stealing our time.

Problem was that my brother lived in Berlin, and we did not. So the communication between our police and the Berlin police was a big problem. It worked out quite well, but SLOW AS HELL. My brother’s body was brought to our city when he was already dead for two weeks. I think that is an insane amount of time. Our mortician even said it’s questionable if we could take a last look on him, because the decay may have made too much damage to the body at this time…

but well, we all wanted to see him one last time. We hated the thought, but as we could not say goodbye this was probably going to be unavoidable for our minds. My psychiatrist agreed.

Btw: in the meantime I dealed with his death quite okay, I guess.

I read his goodbye letter a few days after his death and guess what: I laughed! Why I did, this is kinda hard to tell, but it was not due to stress. It were the words he left me that were so extremely well-thought and heart-warming to me. So typical and hortative. But I won’t recite them now, sorry.

Nethertheless, after reading them I instantly changed in a matter of seconds. From this point on I wanted to change.

First thing I did was finally cutting my hair. As you probably knew I had very long, blonde hair, right down to my ass! I struggled a lot during the past few months about what to do with them, but reading the last words of my brother was the last thing I needed to finally cut them. Why you ask? Well… hard to describe. Let’s just say I wanted to be me.

I remember when the funeral first came up it was that my mother asked me what he should wear, because she could not decide what to give the mortician. We have browsed through his clothes, but did not find anything suitable for the case. He had most of his clothes in Berlin, and yet we did not get anything from there.

So I decided to give him my favorite shirt. A long-sleeve worker shirt, black. I never saw him wearing anything alike (because he ALWAYS wore black t-shirts without print or long-sleeved hoodies), but I knew it would suit him well. I think it was the second shirt I bought myself on my own. The first shirt I bought on my own was the same worker shirt, but as a t-shirt. I loved that shirt, and was SO AMAZED that I accidentally stumbled upon the same shirt but as a long-sleeve version, so I had to buy this, too.

I wore the t-shirt on his funeral day.

So, the day finally happened. The day we all were so afraid of.

We all knew that this day would change a lot, because when you finally see him dead, that’s like a fist in the face of your conception. A hard hit. But you better take it, for the sake of reality.

One hour before the funeral we, meaning me and my parents only, were going to do our last farewell to Marco. The mortician and his wife let us to the chapel, he went first, my parents after him, and I at last. We went slowly.

I had a basketball with me.

Thing is, we wanted to give him objects of interest on his way. We all thought deeply about this. My mother wanted to give him a basketball, as he was a passionate basketball player and referee. That pretty much filled up most of his life – he played in many teams and half of the people he knew were basketball players. My father wanted to give him a set of skat cards, as he and my brother used to play skat in a small league in our home town every few weeks. Or mortician has also been in this league. I don’t play that game, but my father always said he was a good and very fair player. He was always so proud of him when they came back from a game. Mostly with a prize, like a piece of meat or something like that.

My present was something that probably would have meant a lot to Marco. As you by now know how we both loved playing Secret of Mana you might understand how profound this gesture was. I once bought me a keyring pendant of a Rabite, the main monster from that series. Google it, I bet you know that cute thing! I remember him spotting that little, yellow figurine on my key chain and obviously being very jealous about it. And I loved looking at the thing, as it remembered me of all those fun hours I spend with my brother. Anyway, I thought it to be a good idea to give that figurine to my brother.

Last thing I grabbed before I went to the funeral was a CD I found in his room entitled “Best of”, with contained music from his favorite band MUCC and such. I guess this was also a good choice to give him on the way, even though I did not have any clue about this kind of music.

I carried that basketball for my mother. Must have been a strange look.

The mortician opened the door to the chapel. To my surprise my parents did not really stop their walking and approached slowly to the corpse on the other side of the small chapel. The coffin was sloped in a 30 degree angle, so one could see his face from the door, if it weren’t for the shitload of colored flowers in front of him (I did not want to get the decoration become too colorful… but that did not matter at this moment). On the left was a little bit of space, so one could approach Marco. On the right was his photo I edited a few days ago, standing on some sort of small booth. The left and right wall of the church was supplied with benches. Behind him, of course, a really big cross. (god, how I hate that christian symbolism! And my brother did, too, but what could we have changed about that…)

anyway, I could not stare in that direction. My parents were in the middle of the chapel when I entered. I immediately walked to the left, because I had to sit down. I sat down, the basketball on my lap, I faced the right right wall, heard my mother breaking into tears. And than the crying began.

So I sat there, for I don’t know how long. Just crying. Crying so hard.

Weird side fact: I am not ashamed of crying, that’s what I sometimes do when things get rough on an emotional level. For personal reasons, or just after some sad movie. But the hardest I every cried was – strangely enough – to the series finale of Six Feet Under. That changed on the day of the funeral.

I don’t know how long this went on. Maybe 5 minutes, or 25. I bet between 10 and 15. Somebody, I think my father, grabbed the ball off me. At some point my parents slowly left the building. the mortician lead my parents to the front door, and his wife finally lead me to my brother. With my parents gone I was able to approach the coffin, her holding my arm. And that was for the best, because when I was near enough to SEE him… it hit me like with a baseball bat. I suddenly had problems standing and had to hold myself back not to scream in despair. She said I should hold it back until my parents got out of the door.

I could hardly see, hardly stand. The sight of this was so bizarre and heart-breaking sad. I am now going to describe my brother, so you might wanna skip this paragraph.

He looked ridiculous. Like a clown with really strange makeup. His hair was ruined and looked like thin straws. His skin was spotted. His lips covered in black lipstick (I don’t know why). He looked like he was asleep.

What made this a very scary look were the two facts that, for once he did not breath (what destroyed the picture of him only sleeping), and the other thing was his eyes were sunken, just a little bit, but clearly visible.

God, I so hate remembering what that looked like. I will never forget that look. I haunts me a bit, but I think that’s normal.

The cards were positioned near his hips, properly fanned out. The ball was positioned to his feet. I positioned the CD right next to the cards, and than had to struggle myself with positioning the Rabite.

I was SO AFRAID of getting more near to him, or even to touch him. I needed one minute, but I finally placed the figurine on his stomach.

Then we went out.

We drove to friends to wait for the actual funeral to happen and to calm down a bit. We basically sat there for half an hour, crying.

After that we drove back to the graveyard were all the guests already waited. And hell, those were so many, we couldn’t believe it!!

in his last words my brother sorrowed that nobody would miss him. Hell, was he wrong! There were at least 60 people out there! If he could have seen this…

we went into the chapel, sat down on the far right side. The rest of the room slowly filled up. The music that was playing was Rachmaninov’s “Vocalise” (my choice). Half of the guests had to wait outside, because we were too many to fit into the small chapel.

The mortician held his speech, which was okay, I guess. The thing that I found touching was a paragraph about me and my brother. Pretty normal, I think.

Afterwards I got told that when the speech was over a few raindrops fell down, which could easily be interpreted as symbolism… I dunno.

When the speech was over the second song I wanted to hear on the funeral started to play: Bach’s “Air”. And again I started to cry.

I kinda ruined that song for me by choosing it. I loved that song, and you can guess that I can hardly hear to it anymore. But well, it was worth the sacrifice.

I’ll cut the rest short, as there wasn’t anything special left to happen.

We went out and to the grave, let the coffin down, and everyone of the guests hugged us (which was very strange). My former best friend was also there, but I did not recognize him, but found out later. I must have hugged him, too, but as I haven’t seen him for like seven years – can you blame me?

The closest circle of relatives drove to a cafe were we ate and talked. And that was pretty much all on that day.

Later on I cried some more. In the evening my eyes were burning as hell, as I cried too much. At some point I somehow stopped, but maybe I only had no more tears left on that day. I don’t remember if I slept at all the next night.

Since then life started to slowly get better. I love my friends and how they were moved by the happenings, thanks to you all! Everybody wanted to help. I am in love, with the world and the people and life itself. And I have got a special person in my heart again – for the first time in years.

Things are great and I want to move forward. Do things and experience. And live.

I want to end this post with a quote that I found to be very fitting to the situation and to my brother. I even had to put this into his funeral ad:

“It’s time that we go now. I, to die, and you, to live on.” -Sokrates