Honey-sweet Specter

There’s something disconcerting about a homecoming painted by a funeral. The inexplicable mix of relief and dread, grief and excitement. My family went back to Pennsylvania months after my mother’s death. Summertime. The air was hot, but still not nearly as humid and stifling as I’d grown used to in my years apart. Thick foliage lined every step I took, and the sun set late, dappled by fireflies. I’d missed fireflies. You never got them where we’d gone. 

The roads in my small pocket of southern Pennsylvania are long, winding, and dark. One lane going in each direction, no medians or gates in between to keep you separate, on track. My father drove recklessly, swerving into other lanes, headlights shifting rapidly against the trees, flashes of brown and green and endless, stretching pavement. He drove recklessly, and he yelled when my sister and I cried. 

I lived in a strange haze those next few days. Going around the town I’d known and loved felt like walking through a stranger’s living room. I could pick out the basics––the couch and the fireplace and the television––but the fine details felt fuzzy and off. I vividly remembered the orchards we visited, but I couldn’t seem to place their small marketplaces in my memory. I walked through the aisles, picked up various sweets, and half-expected my mother to tell me I could only pick one. 

I remember buying honey sticks and making up a memory of eating them with my mom. It was fake, and I knew it, but there was comfort in drinking the sickly-sweet syrup and pretending it was something I had once enjoyed. If I closed my eyes and focused my senses, I could pretend the birds chirping in the distance were the same ones that woke me up in the mornings, and that my mom was just down the aisle, planning dinner and watching me through the corner of her eye. 

Everything about coming home seemed to augment the flaws that embedded themselves in my life. An emptied space sat in the air, draping itself across the treetops and the brewing storm clouds that crackled with electricity. For my mother’s service in Florida, where we’d lived for the past few years, we had gone into a backroom at the funeral home and picked out an empty urn we thought she’d probably like––stuck it at the front of the room and packaged it as her final resting place––and somehow this felt just as hollow. 

This technically wasn’t a funeral, but a gathering marketed as a “celebration of life.” Something about it felt more like a death sentence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, and the notion seemed cruel, but facing the people I hadn’t seen in years and seeing their eyes fill up with pity and morbid interest was daunting. My family adamantly called it a “celebration of life.” Never a funeral. Never a memorial. They danced around the subject and let my dad get too drunk and let his parents pretend they had considered my mom a daughter instead of an intruder. Maybe they did, and maybe I’m just holding onto old resentment––a lingering distraction––but the anger still boiled in the pit of my stomach. Bubbling discomfort. I hated everything about this. Hated everything about the place and the people that I loved. 

I think I’d expected speeches. People standing up to share tales of my mother and her life. She had been dynamic and social. Extroverted where I couldn’t be, brave where I was too scared, and friends flocked behind her like turtle hatchlings scrambling to the sea. They followed her everywhere, and she somehow managed to juggle all of them along with her work and family. With a person like that––a firecracker, a skyscraper––I’d expected speeches. Instead, we broke off into sections and spoke amongst ourselves almost quietly, while pictures of her slid by on a screen. 

I’m not even sure my group of friends mentioned her. At the moment, I found it nice. I didn’t have to think about her and instead just got to talk with my old best friends, but as the afternoon wound down and people began winnowing out, a dull ache of missed opportunity began to stab at me.

Speaking about her myself seemed impossible, even when I looked back on the day and tried to imagine how it could’ve gone differently. I’d spoken at her first funeral and made it most of the way through before my voice cracked and wavered. I was embarrassed to be crying in front of everyone, and even more embarrassed for being so ashamed. It was my mom’s funeral and I was allowed to cry, but discomfort flooded my system and made the bottoms of my feet itch uncomfortably. I couldn’t do it again. I’d made my peace with that.

But it seemed like a waste to not have her friends tell stories. Sometimes when the nights are long and empty and I find myself missing her more than I have in years, I think about the monotony of all of this stuff––responsibilities and jobs and filling the time with things that we think make us happy, just for all of us to end up vanished and forgotten. What’s the point of doing it all if in the end your friends don’t stand up and talk about you? Laugh like you're in the room and smile at your memory. What’s the point of doing it all even if they do, if you won’t be there to see it? 

I’d like to talk to my mom one more time, to sit with her arm bent around my neck and spill all the life secrets I’ve gathered. Planning a journey in my head, constructing the scene like honey sticks and roads blanketed by obsidian skies, someday I’ll go back and speak to the lives that linger in the air. Let the words reach out and smother the taste of the scattered ashes that still seem to rest on my tongue. Or maybe I’ll be too afraid of the ghosts. 

Faith Eberz is an Orlando-based writer, currently studying English and Creative Writing at University of Central Florida. She primarily writes confessional poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary fiction, and her work has been featured in Young Writers USA and Wingless Dreamer.