Page 16 of Love at a Funeral and Other Awkward Conversations

Then I find the glue and get to work with family photos and pictures of Ray on a poster board. Vince said it would be nice to stick them around the room during the service. I agreed to do it, although they’re looking a lot more like a third-grade art project than a “memory board.” I place a classic school photo of him right at the top, next to one with the two of us as little kids running through a sprinkler, holding hands. There’s one of him dressed as G.I. Joe for Halloween next to self-portrait drawn in crayon from first grade. There’s a picture of him grinning in a crown as homecoming king with his arm around Vince, who wore a court sash, and I glue it next to one of him wearing a matching tutu with Lucy and Lara.

Ray was forever taking pictures, and I once asked him what he planned on doing with all of them. He said he’d put them in photo albums eventually, but that eventually will never come around now. Although these piles and piles of photos serve him well today.

I assumed it would be difficult to do this, but I zone out to the point of anesthetization. It’s like I’m looking at pictures of strangers. They’re happier, living in a different timeline. There is no way that is him or me or my family all grinning on a boat with big orange life vests around our necks. Or, at least, it’s not us anymore. These people are all strangers to me.

The house phone rings, and I consider not answering it but pick it up anyway. “Hello?”

“Hi, I’m calling for Donna, please.”

“She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

“Yes. My name is Janine, and I’m calling from the county coroner’s office.”

She pauses, allowing enough time for my brain to catch up. “Oh. Hi. I’m Cass, I’m Ray’s sister. You can talk to me since, uh, my mom’s not really…”

She hums in what sounds like empathy. “Sure. Cass, before I start, let me say how sorry I am to be calling you. Please extend my condolences to your family.”

“Sure. Thank you,” I mumble, nervous about what she’s going to tell me, even though it can’t be any worse than learning he’s dead.

“I performed the autopsy on your brother and found he suffered a massive heart attack, caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.”

I rub my fingers over my forehead a few times, hoping all the information she’s giving me sinks in. She talks about gene mutations and genetics, muscle cells, and other science terms I should probably remember from Bio 101 but don’t. “This may run in your family, so I would advise everyone to make an appointment with the doctor. This often isn’t detected because some people who suffer from it are young and the symptoms of it don’t appear any different from the flu. I know?—”

“Did it hurt?” I blurt out, cutting her off.

“I’m sorry?”

“Did it hurt?” I repeat, the cement settling in my chest again. “When he died?”

“No, it didn’t,” she says gently. “It would have been instantaneous, like turning off a light.”

I nod, as if any of this makes sense. “Mm-hmm.”

“Try to find a little bit of solace in that,” she says, and I thank her before hanging up.

The heavy weight of this knowledge settles on me. On top of everything else, I have to explain to everyone how Ray died, although I can’t even remember what hyper-trophy-cardio-tappy—or whatever it’s called—is.

I Google it, spending hours reading about my brother’s condition, falling down a rabbit hole of learning about the human heart. I treat it like I’m cramming for an exam, trying to comprehend the inner workings of the ventricles, as if the more I know, the more I’ll be able to grasp why this happened. As if it isn’t totally random my brother inherited this particular brand of heart disease, which arbitrarily killed an otherwise healthy young man.

There were no symptoms, no reason for him to get his heart checked. Plenty of people have heart attacks and survive, some of whom are probably older and weaker. But this shouldn’t have happened to Raymond. His body betrayed him.

Confusion and fury rip through me, and I step on the memory boards, barely holding back from shredding them. I clench my fingers into fists to stop myself, yelling nonsense to expel the anger from my body. I stomp and jump and throw my arms, but it doesn’t help. I want to break something. I want to punch a hole in the wall.

I want to smash.

Smash everything to unrecognizable bits.

Maybe then my life wouldn’t feel so out of place.

Instead, I grab my phone and pull up Vince’s number. I never make phone calls, but my brain is too full, my fingers too numb to text him. When he answers, I offer him a quick “Hi” and then, “It was a heart attack.”

“What?”

“Ray died of a heart attack because of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” I don’t give him a chance to ask any more questions because I word-vomit everything I’ve learned from the internet. I tell him every detail I can remember from the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, the Cleveland Clinic, and Wikipedia. And he stays silent until I finally say, “Did you know Ray owned the reissue of Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill?”

“The album? By Alanis Morissette?”

“Yeah.”

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