I Danced At Your Funeral

By Megan Wildhood

I wish it didn’t take chaos to inspire me to let go of delusion. Actually, I wish we had a world where safety and love weren’t delusions. Where holding hands with my fiancé surrounded by people who had all volunteered to play a part in our wedding while singing beautiful songs to a God who loved us all was the real thing. Meaning, I wish the family I thought I had finally found in the years of late-night prayer sessions, spontaneous road trips to Canada, tea crawls throughout the city trying to get me to see tea as more than just water that’s trying too hard, and conversations about things I had never been asked about before in my life, like my feelings, was actually the family I had finally found. 

But exactly zero parts of that world were true. It took over a decade for all of it to shatter, but even the parts with you, Mama, and your husband, Papa, eventually did, too. The pastor of that church that was so full of light in my eyes sinned against me right after my first wedding, as you knew. (Did you ever hear? I’m no longer married to that guy—part of The Fallout, too). You and your husband were the only elders at that church who knew what actually happened because I told you myself: our pastor had a massive crush on me for four and a half of the five years that we’d been close like what I thought was just family and then told me about these feelings one-on-one not as a confession but as an accusation and an invitation. This was after he did the premarital counseling with the guy I never should have married and then officiated that wedding. Four months after. 

I chose to tell you, Mama, and your husband, Papa, because I quickly learned that I couldn’t trust who I thought was a pillar in the church, but I knew I could trust you. I had trusted you far more than I’d ever trusted my bio family. Even before my senior year of college when I lived at your house and worked through some serious childhood baggage with your unwavering support, presence, prayer, and determination to see me through that dark night of the soul. You were the first woman I ever felt safe with, the first one it made sense to my heart to call Mama. My first time being spiritually adopted was by you. Of course you and Papa were safe. The year I lived with you solidified this trust: so many good-night songs, so much banjo (him) – saxophone (me) – dancing (you) – improv in the living room. So many hours of deep talk about and to God together. So many road trips to prayer conferences and healing rooms and weekend mini vacations and late-night sleeping-bag deliveries to the latest crop of homeless youth on the heroin-pocked, increasing graffiti-ed, streets outside our church.

You probably forgot all that in the beginning stages of your illness. But I will never forget how you said what you said when I told you about the church situation. The exact words are lost to history, but it was with mama-bear-protector indignation that you vowed to confront the pastor and go make things right. Your husband, my Papa, was silent. Remember? 

This whole mess was probably among the first of your memories to go, actually. So I’ll tell you again. I had to directly ask Papa if he thought this thing with the pastor was my fault. I still remember his words, and mostly his silence, exactly over 12 years later because they did not include a direct no. And they were are also my mother’s at almost every point I needed to know I wasn’t am not alone: “There are two sides to every story.” Was that supposed to be my signal that my relationship with Papa was over? You still spoke to me, so I thought things would get worked out with Papa eventually. I thought that for years. 

Every February for the next six, you called me on my birthday. You invited me to interesting shows around town. You bought me gifts that only a person who really, really saw me would give. When Papa wasn’t home, we danced around your living room like Jesus does over us every day you would say. All like nothing had changed. All like nothing had to change. I held on for almost a decade thinking that surely, my relationship with Papa would one day be restored. After all, Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. Even if the entire rest of the church abandoned me—it’s far easier to lose a pesky congregant, especially one as dumpster fire as I was—surely you and Papa knew the real meaning of the Bible. I’d seen you live it day in and day out, which was only one year out of what turned out to be 53 years of your life together. 

And then, one February, my birthday came. You didn’t call. I waited another year, but you didn’t the next year, either. Was it time to release the hope of reconciliation with Papa and anyone at that church who hadn’t reached out in a decade? I had let things settle where they were, accepted that this was how things were going to stay with the church people, the elders, Papa. But I guess I hadn’t surrendered hope that God would bust through all the human garbage and break out a miracle. Or maybe I just hoped that, because you and I would of course keep talking, that time would whittle away at whatever wall Papa felt he needed to put up.

But how pathetic would it be for me to wait another year for just one phone call? Talk about begging for crumbs. No. It was time to relinquish my impulse to apologize for somehow making things awkward between you and Papa as if that were the secret key to let me back into that church family, and start believing I could find a new church.

You didn’t call. All I could think was Papa has finally convinced her of whatever he believes that inspired him to abruptly and without any explanation end relationship with me. 

Okay. I shook my whole body. Okay. It is time to move on. 

Sometimes, being a grownup means one can still live one’s best life even when one doesn’t get answers one “should” be able to get. And it’s a sign of strength to forgive someone who never apologized. Right? It’s the mark of good character to be able to move on, offering a clean slate to every new person one meets after the deepest betrayal(s) of one’s life. This is what God wants. Forgive and forget. Right? Don’t let those who seared your soul run your life. Don’t let anyone sear your soul. You are stronger now because this didn’t kill—

The call about your diagnosis came in what felt like the middle of the night. It could have been noon; I don’t remember—is that how it started for you?

Someone from our old church who knew I was close to you had texted me to see if I was free. I hadn’t responded because I was asleep. Literally or figuratively. It didn’t matter. Nothing much mattered anymore and that was how I knew I was an adult. Being able to get through life without letting anything or anyone stop m—

Alzheimer’s. 

My second worst fear. For myself and everyone I love or have ever loved.

You had Alzheimer’s. And you already could no longer dance. 

It would only be a matter of time before you could no longer speak, sing, run out in the middle of the night to drive a sleeping bag to a homeless youth before pulling out all the stops to get them a place to stay—even if it was, in more than one case, on your couch. Just like me when I was homeless in all the ways I couldn’t have even imagined except the way that leaves you cold and exposed and invisible like my grandmother who was homeless as a child in the Great Depression and yet still thinking finishing college, dammit, was the Most Important Thing in life. 

Yet I’ll bet I’m the one in the droves you rescued that won’t be allowed to say goodbye. 

This time, I let the floor of my bedroom crack open. I let my first worst fear swallow me: darkness. All the way down. Or up. 

Directionless.

Memoryless. Or unable to distinguish between memory and reality. They say this is a normal feature of the brain. Remembering this as I freefall through black does not comfort.

Is this what you experienced until the end? 

Maybe it was fine for you. In a way, being directionless is like being in the moment. Each one is new and you eventually don’t know there should be any continuity between them so you don’t know to be stressed out.

When I knew you (when you knew you), there were only a few times you showed you were stressed about anything. One of them was not the time you and your daughters, who I thought were my friends, thought your husband was having an affair with me. All this time I was mad at Papa for being a coward, for his inscrutable amputating me from the family at a time I really needed community.  

It was you. Your suspicion, which you never addressed with me directly. Neither you nor your two daughters, women I had trusted as friends, ever talked to me about your toxic concerns. You were the reason I never got to say goodbye to you, the reason I felt like a fugitive sneaking in the back of your funeral for a crumb of closure. Do you remember? Do you remember when you started having such crazy thoughts as my spiritual daughter is aiding and abetting an affair with my husband of 50 years? Was it before or after the people around you starting detecting the jumble in your mind? Do you remember accusing Papa, giving him no choice but to devastate me and himself? Was it before or after our former pastor invited me to have an affair? Before or after everyone, including my ex-husband, blamed me—or is that what gave you the idea? Would you have remembered by the end what you said to him to get him to cut me off from himself, from you?

No. You probably wouldn’t have even known me by the end. If you knew me ever.

All the way until I learned of yet another false accusation about me from the church I had earnestly believed with my whole chest I would be part of for life, I was mad at Papa. Coward I would hiss at him when happy memories of us bobbed to the surface of my sulci for no reason whatsoever. I would wash-rinse-repeat the forgiveness process our Lord Jesus Christ lived out immaculately, hoping it would someday stick permanently about you. In the instant I learned of your accusation, that struggle was gone and I understood: Papa had no other choice than to banish back to the land of homelessness in terms of safe family, and it probably seared him, too.

The truth does indeed set you free.

I had been mad at the wrong person for over a decade. But I wasn’t going to forfeit any more of my life to that bitter pit by transferring hurt and anger and blame to the person who, according to the world, deserves it. I want to live in the world where hurt and confusion and anger and blame and keeping score and self-righteousness don’t belong. This is the one you belonged to: I was, in effect, the “other woman”—though only because you and your daughters imagined me to be—and yet, you didn’t blame me. You put the responsibility on the right person, had you been right in your assessment, and you talked to me as long as you could.

Which was not nearly as long as one of the speakers at your funeral got to talk to you: another woman you housed when she was actually homeless as a new teenage mom. She got to visit you up until the end and she told all your funeral attendees all about how she got to say goodbye. Right before your two daughters, wearing flowy dresses and maybe yoga pants underneath?, rose from their seats and led that makeshift congregation in a dance of worship and praise before the One you, now Home for keeps, get to see with unveiled eyes, probably like the dance you’re free to do again now.

I was in the back so as not to be seen by your family, but I let go of all the chaos you and your daughters caused in my psyche as I let them lead me so I could dance, too. 

Biographical note: Megan Wildhood is a writer who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.