The Wedding Season

My five siblings and I were raised on funerals. Every year someone in our extended family would die and we’d be carted off to a funeral home for two nights of a wake and a funeral the following day. It is a recurring joke among all of us – the funeral home of choice with the cluster of grapes wallpaper that hung behind the casket, the extra good behavior required for three days straight, my cousin’s wife who saw a set of keys in a door in the room where cookies and orange juice were being served, my cousin who told her not to open it, the look of horror on her face when she did and a dead body was on a table, followed by my cousin saying, “What in the hell did you think was going to be in there?” Our family lore was death. Then came the really hard ones – the teenage cousins with the heart conditions, young family friends with tragic endings, our dad, Mark, and then our mom. We arrived at them all dressed in condolences and sorrow under the guidance of our parents who believed that…