Saturday

"...the youngest brother finally took off the Cloak of Invisibility
and gave it to his son. And then he greeted Death as an old friend
and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life."

American Black Catholics, in the northeast of the country at least, tend to subscribe to the Irish style of mourning, which is to say, rollicking, even though in this case there was, atypically, no alcohol (my brother was one of the few teetotalers who could party with the jolliest drunks and you'd never know he was the sober one.) There was a super turnout, and nobody over the age of forty could figure out whence they knew anybody else, or how they were related, if at all. People turned up from as far away as California, Texas, Nevada: that AF 1LT bearing the urn is The Son.

The kids my brother coached turned up in their basketball uniforms; the Little Diva had a smaller boy trailing her around adoringly all afternoon. The Evil Niece was at her best; she may be a soulless fiend, but above all, she is a performance artist, as is everyone in the family. She looked tiny and fragile delivering a very moving eulogy that almost fooled even me. Several diabetics had to leave early, but the old ladies (including junior seniors like myself) were entirely charmed.

The schoolkids sat more patiently than the adults waiting for someone to figure out how to project the slideshow of the BoyBaby from a year or two after birth to an equal time span before death.

I assume it went all right from his end as I haven't had any weird dreams or nightmares; I did, however, wake up with horrific crippling muscle cramps in my left buttock, the same quadrant of the body as the bone metastasis that was giving him pain I thought was muscle spasms from lack of exercise. Very funny, Little Bro...