After Your Funeral

By Mike Zimmerman

The five of us promised your mother we would clear out the apartment. Grief-stricken, she’d tried her best, but left us with whatever she couldn’t take or toss. So, we’d divorced ourselves into two cars, and Jessie made an appointment with a disposal company. We had until 8 pm tonight to sort out everything. 

Whatever that meant. We’d agreed to help without even seeing the place. 

Byrce, Amy, and Cat volunteered to stop and get supplies they thought we’d need—mostly trash bags and boxes and rubbermaid bins. It was strange to see them again, after they’d moved away and started families while you and I stayed in the city. It was strange to think of Byrce the business owner and Amy the mother and Cat the COO, when we’d all had our first job together, our first venture away from our respective corners of the world. Of course, you always stayed in touch with everyone, so it wouldn’t have been a surprise to you. But for me, it meant reconciling the past with the present, revising the fixed person I remembered and letting them be refreshed.  

Meanwhile, Jessie and I went to yours to make sure we could get in—your mom couldn’t keep track of keys at the moment. Silent in the car, Jessie and me, save for the slow, soft whirl of the A/C. The trees had more to say with the late spring wind, which shook through the upper branches, than I did with an old friend who I messaged sporadically on Instagram when she posted pictures of her dog. 

I parked and Jessie wiggled the key in your front door, frowning until click the deadbolt snapped back. 

Your apartment looked different, although nothing had changed. Your plants still grew in a landscape of green, green on every windowsill and shelf, blooming in the corners and hanging from the walls. Whereas before I’d thought of them as another quirk of yours, part of your beauty, now they were an impossible nuisance. An infestation, even. We couldn’t throw them away—they’d meant so much to you—but what were we going to do with them? I resented them, I resented you, I resented the fresh green mint creeping out of its pot. Burn it—burn it all, I thought. 

All I could see were obstacles—all the things that still must go. The furniture would be up for sale, even the couch you and I had lugged home from a stoop listing. The bookshelves would be cleared, and the contents donated, the kitchen would be trashed, and the plants, the plants, what the hell were we going to do with all these plants? A puzzle of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’  gave a slash of yellow on the coffee table. Unfinished, now and forever.

“Matt?” Jessie asked. She approached quietly, hands splayed across her cheeks. Maybe she wondered, too, what the hell we would do. When was the last time she was in your apartment?

 “Sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten she was with me. “I guess…you caught me thinking. I don’t have much to say.”

“That’s okay,” Jessie said. “I needed to get away from everyone else.”

“Oh?” I said. I made a half-circle around the green lawn that once was your apartment. 

Jessie shrugged. “Everyone’s been doing lots of catching up, I guess.”

We had all managed to avoid our anger, at each other and at you, with polite conversation, as if we hadn’t once been each other’s best friends. “I wish Cat hadn’t told that story about spilling wine. Why bring that up? Like, of all the places…Spilling the wine? After what we know now?”

Jessie turned away and gently reached over to the mint running wild in the shade by the corner. I thought she might not respond, but, finally, she said, “Yes, it bothered me, too.” She faced away from me.   

I walked into the kitchen and brushed my fingers against the fuzzy edge of an African Violet. My poor sweet Lady, I thought. And thinking about it reminded me that our inside jokes were gone, too. 

Twelve years ago, now, calling you “the Lady” had slipped out in the most natural way. We met after work at a wine bar—the Robust Vine, remember? — but I knew nothing about wine. So, when the handsome bartender asked me what I’d have, I shrugged.

“I’ll have whatever the Lady’s having,” I said, gesturing at the purple drink you swirled. You looked like a pro. (And, of course, you were by that point. Right?)

“The Lady!” you cried, affecting a posh accent. “I’ve never been referred to as a Lady before. I love it.”

“What dost The Lady drink on this fine September eve?” I asked, prompting another round of high, happy laughter.

“The Lady doth drink the cheapest red on the menu—dost The Gentleman approve?”

So began this particular inside joke, a bit that would run between us almost daily. Now, I held the African violet and heard a small voice behind me.

“You thinking…of her?” Jessie asked.
        I nodded. “A little inside joke.”

“Why did we all move away?” Jessie said. 

I shrugged, and I watched the plants, their arms swaying from the breeze of the open window. Moving in the corners of my eyes, like green ghosts.

“While you were thinking, I counted,” Jessie went on. “I figured we’d probably end up donating a lot of her clothes and selling everything else—but the plants we should keep. So, I counted the plants, I didn’t tell you, I thought you might think it was nuts.” She flushed. 

“No, I don’t think it’s nuts,” I said. Jessie would manage this project like she managed us at work eight years ago, with a meticulous, driving focus on details that managed to avoid the greater questions at hand. Fine by me. Stand here, move this, put that in a bag.

“How many did you count?” I asked. 

“Four big, seven medium, and twenty-three small, including all the air plants and the cacti,” she said. “She loved those cacti. I was thinking we could each adopt some plants?”

I nodded and gave Jessie a grateful grin. “I love that idea.” 

Air plants, succulents, cacti, African violets, snake plants, jades, herbs like basil and rosemary, a tomato plant, and other plants I didn’t recognize. Some had grown strange, twisting toward the sun, or creeping along the floor, reaching outside and into the light. We’ll drown in all this green without you, I thought. But I dismissed the thought with a shiver and forced my face onto a half smile. “There really are so many.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” Jessie said. “How did this happen?”

 “Well,” I said, “I think—”

Jessie shook her head. “No, I know how,” she said. “I only mean…I have to find a way to save her voicemails because I don’t want to forget her voice. I don’t want to forget her voice. I went and listened to every single voicemail the other night—” She caught herself and gave me a wide-eyed look. “Is that nuts?”

“Stop,” I said. “It’s not nuts. I spent three hours going through every card she ever sent to me and cursing myself for not keeping them all—”

Jessie sniffed, and I held my arms out for a hug that was so awkwardly received. At first, I wasn’t sure we had hugged, since Jessie never opened her arms—she just bumped into me and then moved away to check her buzzing phone. 

“Okay. Bryce texted—they’re outside. We start with the plants?”

I nodded. “We start with the plants.”

While Jessie went to the door, I looked at the ruins of your life. The plants would be my concession to grief. The apartment would be emptied, the books would be sold, the clothes would be donated, and the trash would be discreetly taken out. Everything else would fit into a cardboard box. Everything else must go.

But not these plants. That wasn’t going to happen. They would stubbornly burst and bud, swell under the care of your friends. Then they’d be repotted, repotted again, until finally they’d filled the windowsills of whatever home they were in, bright green and purple and yellow reminders of you. 

Bryce arrived noisily because, of course, it’s Bryce. He had a stack of giant storage bins and trash bags, his face rounder and his hair grayer than the last time we saw each other. He almost broke that antique vase, the one with the gilded roses, shuffling into the living room. Amy burst into tears immediately and Cat hurried after her, the sounds of quiet, controlled sobbing echoing in the silence.  

Bryce stood in the middle of the apartment, stuck. He’d left the nonprofit world and joined some consultant business.  “Here we are,” he said to no one, grimacing. He seemed like himself, broad and strong-armed, but softer in the middle under his clothes. I wondered what I looked like to him. 

 “Here we are,” I said. “We didn’t get to talk earlier. It’s been a while. It’s good to see you.”

Bryce gestured at his midsection. “Thought you didn’t recognize me.” He watched the plants. 

“How could I not?” We had worked together for three years, and slept together for a year of them. “You’re in California now?”

“Not anymore. Chicago. And you’re still—here?”

“Still here,” I said. “Remember when we used to convene the New Kids? We called ourselves that since we all started at the same time. Weekly beers in some trashy one-dollar wings bar with blacked-out windows. That summer we travelled together to Amy’s ‘ancestral home’ in California wine country. We were so young.”

Bryce patted my shoulder, not like an old lover, but like an old friend, and that felt right. 

Amy and Cat returned to the living room in unison. Amy had told me that the funeral was her first time leaving her baby. But now she gripped her phone as she collapsed onto the sofa. “I can’t imagine what’s going on at home,” she said, in a little whisper. Cat, meanwhile, stamped around the room as if she were a child on punishment. She’d been the first to quit at our little non-profit, recruited into the world of finance by her father’s company. Her hair pulled back so tight, I wondered if it gave her a headache.

“Well,” I said to everyone. “I guess we’re doing this.”

“I might need to make a phone call,” Amy said, drama in her voice, her eyes still locked on the phone.

“You’ve been saying that all day,” Cat said. 

Amy put down her phone and turned to me. Everyone turned to me, I guess because I’d gotten here first, I lived closest. So I started. “We were thinking, actually, Jessie had a plan,” I said, pointing to Jessie while she continued to inspect each plant, scribbling in a moleskin.

“Ok,” Jessie said, picking up an overflowing pot of ivy, “We go trash, sell, keep. We can split up the plants.”

I expected enthusiasm and a few tears. Instead, it was silent. 

 Ceasing her pacing, Cat spun on her heels. “We can what?”

“We can each take a few plants, based on how difficult they are to care for and travel with,” Jessie repeated, staring at the lengthy list in her notebook.

“You can’t be serious,” Cat said. Cat had always been forceful, difficult, assertive. All the things that made her an amazing person to work at a finance campaign which made her impossible to be friends with for very long. 

Jessie put down her notebook and her pencil, a soft thump in the quiet room. Bryce stopped bouncing his leg nervously. Amy’s eyes went wide. Cat shrugged at all of us.

“We aren’t all a drive away. We have flights,” Cat said. “How are we gonna get those home on a flight?”

The room got tighter. Jessie’s cowed “You really think it’s such a bad idea?” she said. “I hate the idea of trashing them.”

“It’s a big ask,” Cat told her. She sounded like someone in a work negotiation. “We can’t sit with them, I don’t think. They’d be impossible to pack…” She was angry. Her voice getting louder and louder until she was almost shouting. “How did this happen?”

Amy stared at the ceiling. “Okay—stop. We have a job to do here.”

“How did this happen—” Bryce said, then clipped himself short, looking at me. 

I sighed. “You’re asking me?”

“No,” Jessie said. “We are not here to blame anyone.”

“I left Brooklyn two years ago for Manhattan. The place did not look like this when I left,” Cat said to me. 

“You never told anyone what was happening,” I said. “You never told anyone!”

Cat turned from the open window, as if tabulating plants around the living room. “You’re right. I never told. I wasn’t sure.”

“How could you not be sure?” Bryce said. “You lived here.”

“She lied to me,” Cat said. “I can’t believe she did this to us.”

“It’s a disease, Cat,” I said. “Stop treating this like it’s a personal attack.”
“Nobody else is angry? I’m the only person who’s furious with her? I’m the monster, not her, lying to us all for how long?” Cat asked, circling the room. 

“Where were you a month ago?” I said, getting up so abruptly that the wine glasses rattled. “You weren’t here when she was in the hospital, you weren’t here when she lost her job, you weren’t here after the car accident—”

“Matt,” Amy said, patting my hand. “We didn’t know. None of us did. ” Typical Amy. The peacemaker. The middle child. 

Bryce cut in. “I don’t see why dividing up the plants is the first order of business, anyway. I think the first thing we should do is take out all the bottles—”

“Oh, you guys,” Cat said. She clutched her chest as if there were pain there. “Are we really arguing over plants and bottles?”

“Of course we aren’t,” Jessie said, intent on examining the long, reaching tendril of the mint. It grew in the direction of the sun. Although it had only been a few weeks since it had been rotated, it sent its hands toward light, intent on survival.

“No wonder her mother couldn’t stand to clean it.” Cat said, pointing into the kitchen. “Look at all the—”

“That’s enough,” I said.

The kitchen was cluttered with empty bottles. But you know that, don’t you, Lady?  If you had died of breast cancer, or ovarian cancer, if you had died of a heart attack or a stroke, if you had died of diabetes, if COVID had made you too sick to breathe, if your boyfriend or your husband or your lover or your stalker had snuck in through the window and wrapped his hands around your tender neck, your tender neck with the tattoo of a bluebird, would Cat feel differently?

Would I?

The truth, your liver failed. You had a drinking problem, you lived alone, and by the time we knew, it was too late. Too late for a transplant, too late for medication. A secret come to light too late. Omission is its own lie. Even in the end, in the stark white hospital, you and I, we never talked about it, not really. I had to hear it from a doctor,  who confirmed what I only suspected. Why didn’t you tell me? As you lay dying, were your cheeks flushed with embarrassment? What did you tell yourself, as the purple and the dark curtain closed over you like a veil—that you had done this to yourself? What a terrible, terrible secret it must have been to keep.

But was it a secret?

Here’s something to consider. You remember Murder on the Orient Express? There’s a scene where Agatha Christie’s famous detective, Hercules Poirot, hustles all the suspects into one room and unveils the solution to the vexing murder: everyone’s guilty. Each person on board the train had participated in the murder of Mr. Cassetti. They all knew. They all hid their secrets, even from each other.

We were gathered here, the five of us. Your closest friends. Didn’t we know something?

Amy had whispered a story outside the memorial about finding you drinking wine the morning before some scuba lesson during your trip to New Zealand. Cat and Bryce told your mother a story about spilled wine on the new carpet when you had all been roommates in Harlem. (Why tell that story at the memorial? Still aggrieved over the rug? Who knows.)

Even Jessie had frowned when we walked in—she’d noticed the overflowing recycling bin.

What did I know and when? I knew we often shared a bottle of wine together, and that it occasionally became two bottles. One time, my birthday, you’d gotten much drunker than me and I’d helped you get home. But once—I told myself—is fine. Normal. It could happen to anyone.

Omission is its own lie.

Let’s return to the parlor, your five closest friends, each of them a bit culpable, a bit guilty, a bit lost, a bit misbelieving. My convictions about cause and effect flew out the window with the spring air. Sure, you drank too much, but a person with a drinking problem should be so different, messier. The very laws of the universe must have been reordered if that’s what killed you. If this kind, thin, professional lady could be an alcoholic—could kill herself with red wine—then the plants around this room could whisper, conspire, and rebel against their new owners. The wine glasses could explode. The walls of the apartment itself could tumble down. It made no sense—no sense at all. 

I stood through this moment while Amy turned off her phone, Cat gripped Jessie’s moleskin, and Bryce looked at the plants with a crumbling exterior, like a cake gone soft in the warm air.

“We didn’t know,” Amy said.

“We weren’t meant to,” Cat shook her head. “She kept it so well hidden. Still, I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“But,” Jessie said. “I mean—” she looks at Amy and Cat. “Remember that trip we all took? We knew something was wrong…I mean, before we all went parasailing…”

Cat put the moleskin down and smoothed her hair. Amy held back tears by staring at the ceiling. Bryce sighed.

“I was here in January,” he said to us while Jessie chewed on her fingernails.

 “I told her to go to the doctor. She looked horrible. If I had…I should have forced her to go. I could have convinced her.” Bryce said.

“That was right before my baby shower,” Amy said. “I was too busy to call.”

“I don’t know why they’re moving her ashes back to Michigan,” Cat said, leaning against the wall. “She hated Michigan. Hated visiting. Hated their politics. I mean, her life was here.” She gestured around the green apartment.

“My baby shower,” Amy said again, without looking at anyone. “She was so happy for me. I got too busy to check in.”

“I live around the corner,” I said.  “I live around the corner, and I didn’t know. It’s no one’s fault.”

Jessie spun a plant towards the sun. “Maybe…” She gestured at the unfinished puzzle on the coffee table. “We each had a piece of the puzzle, we just…never put them all together.”

Bryce picked up the mint from near where he sat, sunken into that old sofa. “We should get started,” he said.

“We make three piles. Keep, donate,” Jessie inhaled deeply. “And trash.”

“Wait,” I said, holding my hand out to Bryce, who was about to sweep the mint into a trash bag. 

We planted it in a secret little corner of your front yard. Mint, Jessie said, was very hardy. Acting like I belonged out front with your little spade and a bag of fresh dirt, which we’d hidden in your tote bag, I dug a small hole and I put the mint inside. Jessie tore at the little wet roots to help it spread, and I carefully patted the fresh dirt all around. Amy and Bryce added fertilizer and pesticide from under the kitchen sink. I had this horrible fantasy that someone would come out of your building and scream at us. What are you burying out there! Get off my property! I’ve called the police, they’ll be here any minute you perverts. 

But no one noticed. Finished, we gathered around. Spring was colder in the shade, warmer in the sunlight slicing through the trees. I waited for someone to speak, to say a few words, but no one could until it was time to go back inside—time to finish deciding what to do with the rest of your life.

Mike Zimmerman is a writer of short stories and poetry, as well as a high school teacher in Queens. His work has been published in Cutbank, A & U Magazine, Florida Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Zingara Poetry Review, and various anthologies. Social media @mazaffect.