The sympathy card was signed by me and Lilith

Uncle John's little brother was laid to rest today, as they say. I attended the viewing so I could leave a sympathy card and give hugs to John and his other brother, Paul. The brothers stood at the front of the room next to the coffin in which Jason lay; the top of the coffin bore the logo of the Las Vegas Raiders. The body was not the man who rushed around in dreads only a couple of months before, on security detail. (Security was replaced by cameras and the security guys disappeared.) When I got to John, he was crying, as was Paul. I didn't stay for the funeral, but picked up a button and program at the back as I left. Members of the family wore teeshirts with his face on them; the woman in line behind me was crying, as were others who came back down the aisle from the coffin.

 

I only met Jason once or twice; he seemed a bit jumpy, not interested in the woman who wrote books about the cemetery. But after John texted me that he'd died (at 42), I found an interview with Jason on YouTube, by someone who traveled in the Pacific talking to people. Jason sat on a chair in the middle of a bare yard. He was sad. Sad about his preacher father's neglect of the family for his parishioners, sad that he wasn't Hawaiian enough (he was part African American), sad that he was having to raise his nephews. He wouldn't take drugs, though he drank beer and smoked weed, he said with a glint in his eye. There was something soft, vulnerable, thoughtful in that Jason. "He hasn't been like that in a couple of years," another cemetery employee said to me later.

 

And so he came to be buried in the cemetery that had employed, and then fired, him, the cemetery that had employed, and then fired his brother, John. When I left, Ola (at the gate) said, "I never see you without Lilith." Then: "at least he's being buried beside his father."