Stan's Bus Station Funeral

That's what the funeral parlors feel like in Merida:  bus station waiting rooms.

Noisy.  Lots of people milling around on filthy tile floors. People slumped on benches.  Off the waiting room are small, air conditioned rooms each holding someone's beloved.   You go in, sit in the "chapel" (just benches around the edge of the room), commune with the open or closed casket, talk to the family, then go back out into the waiting room.  You go in and out as you can take it, feel it,  help yourself to Coke from a soda fountain, Yucas idea of heaven, free Coke.

A paid by the mass priest in dirty vestments wheels in an altar with a seen better days white lace cloth, communion stuff, a sad bottle of tap agua, a worn Bible that he doesn't use, just holds.  He asks the name of the deceased and then rattles off a mass, sprinkling the casket with water, constantly asking again the deceased's name as he fills it into the boilerplate.  He talks as fast as he can, emotionless, taking care of business, blesses all quickly and wheels out his altar onto the next lost soul.  Death as not precious, nothing special.  Something actually liberating about this.

This was Stan's funeral.  A motley handful of guests.  Samantha and Dick.  Bob, Tommy and Uncle Ron.  Eva.  Me.  Eva was at this point still concerned with doing things right,  -- a funeral, going to the cremation.  She was a good wife.

Samantha misbehaved.  I noticed her whispering to Bob.  Thought she was asking how Eva was holding up.  But no.  Found out later she was asking him how much this funeral cost, was that a rented coffin, what was the hospital bill -- all the while imagining herself in the widow's seat a few years hence.  Even Bob the scammer was disgusted.

Eva insisted on going to the crematory.  She regretted it after she arrived in a desolate stretch of Merida bordering the jungle, a grey from smoke warehouse, and the shoving in of Stan's cardboard box.  The rented coffin was cradling someone else.

Only a few months later, she refused to call him by name, or say "my husband."  He became the bastard, the scammer, the old man.  He would never be her anything, ever again.   She would not make him her anything, anymore.