On Not Being Invited and Going Anyway by Anne Gudger

I am the prickle breeze on the back of your neck. Your peach fuzz neck hair leans west for a breath. You pet your neck and wonder, what was it? The breeze that is me. You swivel your head, searching for an open door, for outside air inside, but everything’s closed. “Did you feel that?” you ask your daughter, nested at your side, the one who wears wigs like you, the one who eventually had her eyebrows tattooed on since she’s had alopecia since she was five. “Feel what?” she asks, snapping fake eyelashes. All her hairs lost so long ago. 

I am the breeze that flutters an open box of Funeral Kleenex. These boxes stationed between bodies. Bodies with soft shoulders, with folding and unfolding hands, with hushed feet. Bodies waiting for the organist or the minister. The quiet of waiting. Rehearsal’s taught them patience.

You smooth your neck hairs and stare at the front of the church, at the Casablanca lilies flanking the fingerprintless casket. The headache-strong, sticky sweet lily scent. Casablanca: winter white with goldenrod stamins that will drop, stain fingers and countertops if the flowers are taken to someone’s kitchen. To the right of the casket stands a two-foot-tall easel arrangement: a spray of cloud white lilies, roses, and delphiniums, accented with fern fronds, a pink ribbon draped across it like a contest winner: Mother in glitter letters. But her kids always called her Mom, not Mother. Is Mom too short for funeral flowers? This mom—not mine, not yours—who loved fierce. This mom who was part of the family where cousins and sisters and I were raised up like a pack. Where we breakfasted on, “Family first” and “Only trust your family.” This family I’m on the outside of now since after Dad’s death we became a cliché: everything inherited by the second family—you and your daughter. Nothing to the first.

And still. I want to be here. I want to show up at weddings and funerals and the in-betweens. 

You pet your neck hair, like you do, like all the years you smoothed your AquaNet shellacked hair. I remember the click of your long, pointy, frosted-colored nails against the purple aluminum can. The hissing sound of AquaNet as you circled your tall, tall hair, made extra with a wiglet that always scared me when I’d find it waiting on a Styrofoam head. The stickiness of AquaNet. The stickiness of memory. Years ago, a poet friend of mine said, “AquaNet is for pussies. White Rain, baby. Have your characters use White Rain.” 

I am the breeze on the back of your neck. You finger your neck hairs again: this ritual I’ve witnessed since I was seven. You tried calling seven-year-old me Sugar: “Hey Sugar, come here.” But I told you that was Aunt Jean’s name for me, not yours. “Don’t call me that,” I said, fingers balled in the front pockets of my Wranglers. This pet name that was mine, not yours. I held it close. 

I miss Aunt Jean. She navigated our tangled family with grace. 

Then I hear Aunt Jean whisper: You got stretch in you, Sugar. So I breathe and remember: I got stretch. I always have. 

I am the shadow that hovers in the back, inks under the pews, then slithers down the side aisles, up to the church’s nave to check on the dead, in her black polished casket with shiny steel handles. But she’s not there. Just her body. Her flesh. Still, someone needs to watch over the body. An old sentinel tradition that’s been lost as we sanitized death, once death moved from homes, from bedrooms, from parlors and living rooms, once death moved to mortuaries and we turned our faces towards the naked trees out the windows, to the scratching of bare branches against glass, trees asking to be let in or do we ask to be let out? 

I am song, singing her home. Notes thrum between collarbones, tumbleweed up my throat, slip out my mouth. Smoky. Gritty. Then jazz smooth. Ocean wide. Deep as the night sky. 

Anne Gudger is a memoir/essay writer who writes hard and loves harder. She’s the author of THE FIFTH CHAMBER, published by Jaded Ibis Press September 2023. She’s been published in multiple journals including The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She’s won four essay contests and has been a Best of the Net Nominee twice. At the start of the pandemic, with her amazing daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series. Everybody grieves and when we share grief we feel less alone. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her beloved husband. More at Annegudger.com, Anne Gudger on IG and FB. Coffee and Grief Community on FB.

9 November 2023