☆Sara Hunt☆

I put on black to mourn an American, and I walked into a party. I thought I had the wrong house. There was music. There was laughter, real laughter, the kind that bends people in half. There was, I am not exaggerating, a smoker in the yard the size of a small submarine, and the dead man's favorite ribs were on it, cooked to his exact instructions, which he had left behind, because he had planned this. He planned his own party. He knew he was dying, and he spent some of his last good days deciding what songs we would hear and what meat we would eat while missing him. I found his widow. I prepared the careful, quiet words my culture keeps for this. I lowered my head. She hugged me, hard, laughing, and said, "Did you hear the one about him and the boat? Oh, you have to hear the boat one." And she told me a story about her husband and a boat, and it was so stupid, and so him, and she laughed until she had to hold my arm, and then, in the same breath, with no seam at all, she was crying, and still holding my arm, and neither of us moved. That is the thing I could not have invented. They do not separate it here. The grief and the laughing are not two rooms. They are one room. They put the joke and the wound on the same plate and eat both, together, out loud, in the yard, over his ribs. An old friend stood and roasted the dead man for ten minutes. Called him cheap. Called him stubborn. Told a story that made his own grandmother scream with laughter. And by the end the man was weeping openly into the microphone, and said, "God, I'm gonna miss you, you cheap, stubborn son of a," and could not finish, and did not need to. I came to lower my eyes in silence. I stayed until midnight, laughing, eating a dead man's ribs, learning the boat story well enough to tell it myself one day. That is what he wanted. He wanted to be missed at a party. He wanted the last thing his people did in his name to be laugh. Where I come from, we honor the dead by going quiet. Here they honor them by refusing to. And I am no longer certain the silence was ever the kinder one.

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