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being on mainland time woke us all up around 5am. mom considers dark roast coffee "panther piss," so by 6am my sis and i were off to starbucks for some proper bitches brew. we're off to the funeral home, aloha shirt and all, and everyone loses it for a second when we see popo in the open casket. she has a lot of her personal possessions, like bus pass, photos, paper fans, money, with her, and my mom tells my aunty that she looks peaceful. we light incense in front of a photo of her, bow three times, and jam it in the box of ashy sand. then we took ten garbage bags full of folded fake money and emptied them into a grill, which sends her to heaven with wealth. the monks chanted, then just when it was reminding me of a recent "six feet under episode," they finished and the christian ceremony started. the same aunty told me to look away when they closed the casket. nobody freaked out. a lame priest tripped over her name and didn't seem to realize that she was buddhist, my dad read the eulogy about how she grew up in hawaii, raised her sister after her parents died at a young age, helped found a hospital in mainland china, escaped back to hawaii during the war, and volunteered for the red cross for thirty years. me and the other five pallbearers carried her to the car, then out of the car to the interment site, carefully moving it alongside my kung kung's grave and facing so that they both overlook the ocean from their resting place.
i don't know how people can eat during funerals, but i was dizzily hungry by the time it was over. we went to a restaurant inexplicably named "paké" (hawaiian for "cheap"), my crabby great-aunty told me that i was the handsomest grandson, but my guess is that's because i'm half-white. we met the monks back at their temple and did more incense burning and listening to chants. popo wanted a prayer icon put in the temple because she was afraid that we wouldn't pray for her—this way everyone that goes to the temple includes her. my mom finally smiles when she hears this.
posted May 24, 2002 in delivery. 200520032001