FOR ALL the death I’d seen, I’d been to very few funerals.
This one was fraught, and I couldn’t sort out my feelings, or what I was supposed to be feeling. Grandma Norville had fallen and broken her hip three months ago, but the pneumonia she caught after had been the final culprit. I kept thinking I should have been there. I could have come to visit one more time if I hadn’t been so busy, if I’d just made the effort. But I thought she’d hang on longer. I thought she’d always be here. How selfish was it, to feel guilty at someone’s funeral, as if her passing were somehow my fault, or a personal inconvenience? I was sad, nostalgic, tired, shell-shocked.
Mostly, I was worried about my father. He seemed tall and stoic enough, his chin up, eyes dry. Mom held her arm wrapped around his and kept a tissue close to her eyes. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything, though. Not the flower-drenched casket, not the dark-suited minister, not the sky or grassy lawn with its rows of modern, polished headstones. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I couldn’t ask.
The service was graveside, the springtime Arizona weather was reasonable—sunny, but windy. I kept squinting against dust in the air. The crowd gathered was small, incongruously young. All of Grandma’s friends, siblings, and her husband had gone before her. All that was left were her three kids, their families, and a couple of staff from her retirement home. It had been a quiet ceremony.
My husband Ben and I had driven all night to get here. We stood a little apart from the others. Not so much as to be noticeable, but enough to be comfortable for us. Werewolves didn’t do so well in groups, even ones as small as this. Especially when we were off balance. We stood side by side, our hands entwined. Ben had never even met Grandma. He was here to look out for me. A rock to stand next to. He’d pulled out polish, combing the scruff out of his light brown hair and wearing his best courtroom lawyer suit with a muted navy tie. I’d had a terrible time packing, convinced that all my clothes were inappropriate for the situation. I’d settled on a black skirt and tailored cream blouse for the service, and pinned my blond hair up in a twist. I looked like a waitress.
The rest of the family had flown ahead of us. My sister Cheryl’s husband, Mark, had stayed home with their two kids. Standing next to Mom, hugging herself, Cheryl seemed small in her dress suit, which she probably hadn’t worn since before she was pregnant with Nicky, eight years ago now. She was staring at the flowers with a wrinkled, worried frown.
The minister, a nondenominational chaplain from the retirement home, spoke in a calm, inoffensive voice. He’d started with a Bible verse, the one about walking in the valley of shadows and not fearing evil, and dispensed comforting words of wisdom that might have come from the lyrics of a sixties folk song.
What would the guy say if I told him that I’d had proof that people existed in some form after death? He’d probably say, of course. He was a minister, after all. I had proof of life after death. But I couldn’t say I believed in heaven or hell. I still didn’t know what exactly happened to us after we died. What had happened to my grandmother.
When people at the funeral told me that my grandmother had gone to a better place, did I believe them? I believed that part of her lived on. But I couldn’t say where she was. Was she here, watching us mourn for her? I resisted an urge to call out loud to her, just in case. Was the cemetery filled with the shadows of the dead, all of them watching?
I’d met beings who claimed to be gods. Were they, or were they just powerful people who had existed for thousands of years and so built up a tangle of stories around them, and in those stories they became gods?
When the minister called on his own God, did he really know who he was praying to?
In matters of faith, I couldn’t believe in much of anything anymore. I had my family who loved me, my friends I could count on, and that was about it. Everything else—I saw the signs, but I didn’t know what they meant. All I