Cruelty

One of your greatest fears was cremation.  You spoke of it so often and with true horror.  Then they went and burned your body up. They didn’t know how you’d have hated that, because they never asked me. I was the only person in the entire world who knew you and knew all about you and what you thought and felt, but they never asked me.

You said over and over, Tom, that you were deliberately drinking yourself to death. And you did just that. You went and did it, methodically and with intention. And when I called it suicide, they said I was disrespectful.

Tom, they held your funeral without telling me. Without telling me. They didn’t want me there.  They said so. They said, after the fact, that they didn’t want me there because they thought I would make a scene. Which, okay, made me laugh a little, thinking of the absolutely staggeringly grisly, unpleasant, unpalatable, unseemly, inconvenient, horrific, deliberate body horror that was your life and death.  Now that, that was a scene. Had I been allowed, I would have flown into England, put on a nice dress and flat shoes for the graveyard, stood quietly, and left when it was over.  No scene.  I’m not you, Tom, except in effigy.

I held you in my arms, Tom, I knew every inch of you as I knew my own body, and still they wouldn’t let me speak with the medical examiner, because, they said, they were satisfied with the findings.  They didn’t have imagination to think that I wasn’t going to argue with a coroner, I just needed to know for myself what exactly, not generically and second-hand to boot, happened in your lonely end.

Tom, they told me I was upsetting them for begging to have our rings returned to me.  They said the rings didn’t belong to me.  They said I was bothering them and they didn’t want to think about it.  They gave our rings to the old woman who made you sandwiches, and brought you the vitamins you refused to take, and she told me I had no right to the rings and that she was going to send them only if she felt like it sometime.  Our rings, Tom.  They made me beg for our rings.

The cruelty seems so strange to me.  Why would anyone be this cruel to your special person, while still claiming to love and miss you? Do they not realize that it’s cruelty? Surely there is no nuance to keeping me away from your funeral? Or making me beg for things?

But then again, they didn’t really know you, so of course they didn’t know me and barely knew of my existence or how long we were together or what I meant to you.  I have tried to wave them off my conscious mind.  But this pain won’t go away.  The shocking pain of the unfairness of it.  Very often, things aren’t fair though are they.  I wonder why anyone ever expects fairness. You know what though? Sometimes, Tom, I wish I’d never even met you. I didn’t even want to be at your stupid fucking funeral, anyway.