What’s the dress code for a Zoom funeral?

The Zoom funeral, much like the bomb shelters of the Cold War era, will be one of those things future generations remark as an anachronism to be parodied and ridiculed as a way of dismissing the larger societal hellscape that delivered them, and probably rightfully so. Sometimes the complexities of the past are just too painful that they cannot be fully conveyed, though historians, literaries and journalists will try with all their might.

I had the distinct displeasure of attending a Zoom funeral, which felt more like a pandemic merit badge than actual mourning. The funeral took place at noon on a weekday (who knows what day it is anymore) from my dining room table. One of my cats perched on a chair to my left, my boyfriend eating a microwavable burrito to my right, and the tabs containing my school work and to-do lists minimized at the bottom of my screen. The man of the hour was one who had an integral role in my adolescent life. He took my brother and me to get sushi for the first time (our parents gag at the mention of raw fish still to this day) in his white Ford Mustang, that smelled like cigarettes and cherry air freshener from those cat food can looking things that sat on his dash. I got to ride in the front seat. He was the first adult I ever knew to give such a grand shower of affection to whomever he greeted. He was tall, a little red faced with a grin like a person who understood that life was something to be grabbed and laughed with. I can recall many evenings hearing the low rumble of his Mustang pulling onto our driveway, his no knock entrance into our home, his booming voice that echoed through in the entryway. He would stand there in his Galpin Motors windbreaker jacket, waiting for each of us to come out so he could give us a hug and a kiss.

He was my dad’s best friend for over fifty years, the best man at my parents wedding, godfather to my brother, the loudest “Happy Birthday” singer, but to all of us, he was Uncle Bob.

In the midst of the digital grid of familiar faces, there he was, but not really. No, that didn’t look like him. The last time I saw him was two years ago. He was laying on a pool float on a hazy July afternoon in my parents backyard. He was laughing. He was also calling Obama a socialist, but I forgave him for that. I can’t remember now if he was drinking a beer or what color his swim trunks were. My mind is on a reconnaissance mission, so details are important, even the seemingly insignificant ones. The live streamed image of him, pale and deflated in that casket is like a hurricane, seeking to destroy everything in its path. SOS.

Earlier that day, I gave him a couple joints I’d gotten for him because weed was illegal in Idaho where he now lived. His penchant for marijuana felt like a totem of his former, California self. He waited eagerly for his wife to leave before we scurried to the backyard to do the hand-off. His giddiness coupled with the clandestine nature of the interaction was amusing but also insightful. I thought about him and my dad in high school, sneaking behind the bleachers to light up. I also thought about the strangeness of his marriage, that he’d have to go through so much trouble to hide something so benign. A few weeks later, he texted me saying his wife had found the joints and threw them out. He wanted to see if I could mail him some but after a quick Google search I learned that was technically a federal crime, so I declined. I still feel bad about that to this day. Not because he needed the weed desperately but because he probably would’ve done it for me.

Bitterness permeated through the muted screens filled with the names and faces of those who had him torn from their lives not by his death, but by his dismissal. People say there are two sides to every story but I don’t know why people say that. That seems impossible. People and their choices are so much more complex than the two-side allotment accounts for. I hesitate to place the blame entirely on his wife, because, one, it’s too easy and two, blaming the evil woman therefore rendering the man a hapless feather blowing wherever the wind may take him is a trope I’ve grown tired of. Besides, Uncle Bob was no feather. The truth of it all, as objectively as can be stated, is that he left his children, grandchildren and friends to move to Idaho with his wife because her parents were moving there. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that for most of their relationship prior to moving, the gatherings became less and less and his wife made it abundantly clear that our gang was unamusing to her.

But here, in Internetland, where she as the grieving widow plays host to both the funeral and the Zoom session, she is granted the ability to mute all opposition and set the stage for her soliloquy. Her audience is captive. Con Te Partiro swells from a Sony boombox. The green light next to the camera is on. Showtime.

Let’s all say this together; funerals can be funny. And a Zoom funeral with its weirdness and drama dials turned way up, is no exception. I’ve been to a few funerals in my life that ended up being funny. None of the funny ones were ever in a church though, probably because the sanctimonious fire and brimstone vibes of a Catholic church can suck any semblance of light out of even the most joyous of hymns. The first funny thing, besides all the Boomers struggling with technology, was that the service was Christian despite the fact that Uncle Bob was very much a Jew. Like Star of David on a gold chain resting on a bed of chest hair revealed by a low buttoned polyester shirt in the 70’s kind of Jew. Plus, I’d never known his wife to hold any religious views which led me to believe this was a product of their environment out there in God’s country. But then the Pastor said he was going to read Bob’s favorite scripture and then proceeded reciting “The path of the righteous man…”. I laughed to myself imagining his wife asking him about his favorite scripture and after just catching Pulp Fiction on tv, he told her Ezekiel 25:17. I swear in that moment I could see him wink at us from his casket.

My Uncle Bob also suffered an affliction that is quite common with men of that age. Stolen valor. It’s an odd thing for people in my generation to understand. Any survivor’s guilt I would have about not being drafted in the Vietnam War would be overshadowed by my vitriol for the government machine that did that to my generation in the first place. But as I said before, sometimes the complexities of the past are just too painful that they cannot be fully conveyed. Nevertheless, included in the eulogy for dear Uncle Bob was not only mention of his supposed time in the army during Vietnam but a recounting of how the horrors he witnessed while there forever changed him. I will admit, I didn’t get to hear the end of this bogus anecdote because I was too busy watching my parent’s reactions, who, back in the 70’s were getting drunk with him at bars in North Hollywood when he was supposedly having life-changing revelations in the jungles of Vietnam.

The widow then opened the floor to anyone who wanted to speak. She was barely able to finish her preamble before my dad with his unabashed urgency volunteered to go first, his three page speech locked and loaded. His speech made the tears and emotions that I hadn’t yet felt over Uncle Bob’s passing well up and out of me uncontrollably. Dad’s can do that somehow. Or maybe I’m just a typical Daddy’s girl, and so whenever and however he speaks, I hear it. His love and anger bubbled to the surface behind my mother’s rewrites. His biting words that she transformed into funeral appropriate subtext displayed a type of teamwork that I suppose comes from almost half a century of marriage, if we should all be so lucky.

The widow soaked in his words from a funeral home pew, with a handful of people sitting behind her. One of those people was apparently her nephew, who she took great pains to shower with gratitude for setting up the Zoom session. It was odd not just because setting up a Zoom session is something that at this point in the pandemic a first grader is able to do but because most of the people on the call had received a text from her a month or so back, saying that her nephew had the virus at Thanksgiving, just before it had also infected Uncle Bob. A classic case of an arsonist firefighter. I didn’t catch his name but my brother and I now refer to him as “Typhoid Mary”. The rest of the group I did not recognize, so I assumed they were her family. His family, his sons, grandchildren, first wife, brother, cousins and friends were the ones with their faces pressed against the glass, their grief curated and framed up for optimal viewing. Then, with little explanation, the widow disappeared from camera A only to reappear seconds later in camera B, the casket shot, to display the kind of funeral pyre antics that would’ve made even the most dramatic of Italian widows blush. The service seemed to be winding down, and the Pastor said he was going to let the family take some time to say their final goodbyes. I assumed that was my (and others) cue to sign off. But without skipping a beat, the feed was cut. End session for all. That move radiated an unexpected level of cruelty, that neither grief nor ignorance of internet etiquette could excuse.

But she has to figure out how to live the rest of her life now, as do all of us. Grief is an inherently selfish ride. It’s like a fresh wound, with all the nearby blood gushing out of it, requiring one’s full attention to get it to clot and heal properly. When someone dies, our world shrinks, their memory acting as a mere one dimensional substitute. And therein lies the opportunity to create a legacy, or at least the illusion of one. When we die, all we really want is for people to remember the best version of us, the version we wish we were. I get to remember his laugh, the sorrow in his eyes as he helped carry my grandmother’s casket down the aisle of the church, the chirping of his Nextel phone on his belt buckle. I have the freedom, the obligation almost, to discard the parts that are less palatable like his politics or his questionable choices in the December of his life.

So don’t get all of this wrong. She may have sent the invitation link but it was us that created an audience for her to weave her narrative. We gave her the space to tell whatever version of the truth she wanted. We granted her the peace she so desperately sought. She got to pretend to be the victim of circumstances, completely relinquished of all guilt and responsibility over his fate. My dad got to pretend to be the official eulogizer for his oldest and best friend from his home office, hundreds of miles away. And hey, even Uncle Bob got to pretend to be a family man, who found Christ in the foxholes of Vietnam.