I was the only attendee at her funeral. A small mound of dirt piled next to the hole behind a crushed velvet carpet where Father Gray recited 1 Corinthians 13- 4 – Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

It was my Aunt Barker’s request. She was my mother’s sister. I’d spent the previous month with her and her caring hospice staff as she was consumed by breast cancer in her one room apartment in the home, she’d lived for the last four years. She made me promise to follow her funeral wishes. She never spoke again after she slipped into a morphine induced coma. As much as I wondered about her decision, I did as she wished.

She wanted to rejoin her husband – the man who screamed “I hate you and always have!” before hobbling on his cane into the puny powder room of their house, the one plastered with post cards collected from all the places the two of them visited over 50 years of marriage, where after peeing he convulsed, limbs banging and crashing against the walls as his brain tumor finally exploded through his skull.

Even though her ashes were dropped into the ground twenty years hence, I doubted he would have liked it. But she demanded it and I wondered if she recalled that ominous night of his death, because it was only mentioned once – just once – her eyes wide with disbelief, revealing the horrendous shame she must have felt. That palace of pain stayed locked away until the 4th or 5th martini acted as a skeleton key and opened the gate. 

He was a knight in shining armor rescuing her from an old maid existence. She never mentioned the fact her money allowed him to retire immediately after the wedding and spend each afternoon at the Cricket Club playing Dominoes and Bridge before coming home snookered just in time to pour their five o’clock cocktails after she had arrived home from work.

Sickly as a child, close to death more than once, according to her, though my mother claimed she was nothing but an attention-grabbing liar; I had to give her credit for making it to the age of ninety. She lapped in the attention when everyone would comment how they couldn’t believe she was ninety.

Hats made her more attractive, maybe because it took the focus away from a very prominent nose – her description – which she inherited from her father. She was the second child out of four, with her older sister considered a beauty – again her description, who got her looks from her mother. I thought the oldest average looking and made beautiful only in comparison to the younger sister. But younger sis’s liver outlasted the elder by forty-four years. The hell with looks. Just in case of a life after death, she wanted to be cremated wearing a hat.

Finally, at ninety she rejoined him for eternity in that small cemetery.

She was back after twenty years – twenty years alone, searching shamelessly for a replacement. Each possible suitor used her for numerous reasons. She chauffeured, bought dinners, picked up bar tabs for one man after another – each, she was convinced had sworn their love for her. She saw their obituaries in the newspaper. Never was she invited to any of their funeral services.

So, her final resting spot, ashes to ashes, received her and as I exited through the neighborhood of teetering headstones and lurking tombs, I hoped those memories were locked tight and, in death, as in life, she continued doing what she did best – surviving the evacuation of love by immersing herself in one fantasy after another.

Everyone has their own definition of love and hers seemed to work well for her. I stopped and gazed back over my shoulder at the cemetery crew cleaning the spot. Maybe she did have an ulterior motive after all. I smiled broadly and snickered quietly as I began walking again. Payback. She just might have been thinking ahead after all.

After receiving his B.A. in English from Colorado State University, C.W. Bigelow lived in nine northern states, before moving south to the Charlotte NC area. His fiction and poetry have appeared most recently in Midway Journal, The Blue Mountain Review, Glassworks, Blood & Bourbon, The Courtship of Winds, Poetry Super Highway, Good Works Review, Backchannels, The Saturday Evening Post, New Plains Review, DASH, and Blue Lake Review, Short Story Town, INK Babies, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hare’s Paw, The Write Launch, Hole in the Head Review, and Last Leaves Magazine.