It's a new kind of plane.
Virgin Atlantic VS001 from Heathrow to Newark Airport. My grandfather died after a short illness - he had been suffering from dementia for two years - and I bought an incredibly expensive ticket to go to his funeral in New Jersey.
On planes they now let you watch the TV even when the plane is landing and taking off. I can get a little nervous right at the end of a flight as the plane descends so I listened to 'Thunder Road' as we came down over baseball diamonds and water towers.
Me and my cousins
I don't have any photos from the trip - my phone died on the way out and I didn't bother recharging it. I didn't do much, just hung around eating lots of food and watching TV. In America people send gift cards for food delivery to your house if someone dies. My favourite were the fruit bouquets:
I ate so much fucking food. There was nothing else to do.
It was nice hanging out with my cousins although it made me feel old in a new way. I have 15 of them on my mother's side, there is a cluster of them between the ages of 15-22. I could tell that I'd definitely switched to being considered an "old person". It took a few days to really break the ice with them - they are all really close, they have their own stuff going on. Also I've run out of "story", temporarily at least - my next story will be having kids, as far as the family is concerned. The younger ones have all of these potential stories ahead of them. People's careers are basically tedious by the time you get to your mid-30s, unless you do something really radical.
I'd like to move back to New Jersey, but not really.
Catholics
Most of my family are observant Catholics, except for one aunt who is evangelical and one who is a practising Buddhist. My mum has got pretty heavily into it in the last few years as well.
I grew up a Methodist-inflected atheist and have had little exposure to American Catholic traditions. I felt something like an anthropologist during the wake and funeral, observing some strange exotic tribe. The wake was the day before the funeral, on Friday. My grandfather was laid out in an open casket in a room with muted decor and piped organ music. I had never seen a dead body before. We stood and sat around that room from 2pm to 4pm while even more second cousins and friends came to pay respects. For many this involved literally kneeling in front of the body and praying. Otherwise we just stood around and made small talk. At one point I had to go get a coffee just to take a break.
the funeral home in Woodbridge, NJ
Then we went to a restaurant and ate banquet-style on long tables. I can't go into normal American restaurants now without thinking about Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. There was a hilariously overworked waitress in her 50s serving us, with a real New Jersey accent. "Be a dear and count how many people are here". We ate a 5-course Italian meal and then headed back to the funeral home (in Woodbridge, New Jersey) for the second viewing. This is for people who had been working. It went from 7pm to 9pm. My brother then drove us back one hour in the rain to Bedminster, New Jersey, where we were staying with my eldest uncle on my father's side. I had a can of Bud Light with my brother and my cousin Lorraine and watched the late night talk shows.
The next day we got up early and went back to the funeral home. This was the most emotional part of the experience. My uncle, who is a priest, said a final prayer and each immediate family member went to the casket to say goodbye (I did not, I hovered near my mother). Then they closed the casket.
The six eldest grandsons had been chosen as pallbearers (I am the eldest). The funeral home people talked us through it. First the coffin was wheeled on a gurney to the hearse, all of us placing our hands on it. Then we lifted it into the hearse. It was really fucking heavy.
it wasn't all of these steps, just ones at the very top - there's a driveway you can't see
Then we drove in separate cars to the church. It was 9am. The pallbearers went to the hearse and slowly rolled the coffin out on rollers. I was at the front right, gripping it with two hands. We held the coffin at waist height, not on our shoulders. We rotated 90 degrees and walked up the steps of the church. Once inside we placed it on the gurney. After the service we did the same in reverse.
The service focused a lot on my grandfather's strong Catholic faith and how he imparted this on his family (as well as more traditional elements of a eulogy). My cousin who is an opera singer sang all of the hymns - it wasn't a singalong like in Protestant churches. Most people took communion.
After this came the repast - I guess what in the UK would be called the wake? We went to a very tired-looking function room type place and had brunch. Do you know those function rooms that smell of gas from the little heater things? Like the breakfast room in a hotel or B&B?
The brunch made no concession to the idea that brunch food should be somewhere between a breakfast and a lunch. It was a lot of breakfast food and then a lot of lunch food. I basically ate two meals in one sitting. People started to lighten up towards the end. The cousins were playing with the really young cousins under a table in the corner of the room. Everyone eventually gravitated towards it, onto the 'dancefloor' section. They took a bunch of pictures - my grandfather had ten children and they are rarely all together.
After this we drove back to my maternal uncle's house, where my grandmother now lives. I picked up a case of Yuengling Lager, my grandfather's favourite beer. We sat around and ate, took a nap on the big American black leather sofas, watched 22 Jump Street, played a parlour game and then my brother drove us back to Bedminster again.
New York City
The next day I went to the East Village with my cousin Lorraine, saw Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi in the Pride Parade, ate some Basque food in a place I saw on Time Out "Cheap Eats" but somehow spent $85 and was still hungry, ate some dumplings in cheap and good Chinese dumpling shop with lots of passive-aggressive signs on the wall about the queuing system and how the takeaway would inevitably not be as good as eating in because it would cool and congeal ("food chemistry we can do nothing about") so please don't leave negative reviews online unless you've tried the noodles first within 15mins of receiving them, went to a craft beer bar and drank a lot of good craft beer, went to another bar where I spoke to a lesbian pilot about music theory and bass guitar and was fake-congratulated by a gay man for being married ("security!"), then I was at Penn Station having a beer and a slice, then I was at the airport, unable to finish a Palm in the airport bar while trying to get interested in the Copa America semi-final, then on the Dreamliner, asleep.
