Shelter

   My Mom's parents died seven weeks and six days apart, my grandmother in early October and my grandfather late in November.
   "It's the end of an era," my uncles mumbled desolately, stumbling through the house after the second funeral. People filed through rooms embracing each other and clinging a little too long, feeling deeply the  endless loss of our matriarch and patriarch.
   I focused my energy on avoiding tears and thinking about something else, anything else.  There is nothing else.  Autumn was ending and I knew I couldn't handle such all-consuming grief in the winter.  Losing the leaves and the flowers and the taste of life in the air is hard enough every year.  To add to that, especially to add something of this magnitude... unbearable.  I'll grieve in the spring, when I can handle it.  I can't handle it now.  If I process any of this, I'll fall apart and I'll never be able to put myself back together again.  They deserve my strength.  I can't dissolve into desolation.  Any breaking down would immediately result in my being inconsolable.  So I daydreamed about the future, getting married and remembering them from a distance.  My children will grow up with stories of these two, these gorgeous forces of nature I've had the blessing to grow up with.  Will this ever go away, this gaping hole in my heart, in my life?  Will anything ever feel okay again?
   I have never been particularly close to my cousin Burning Man but I passed time during wakes and postfuneral gatherings on couches next to him, struggling to stay dry-eyed. While everyone else congregated in the centers of rooms for comfort, we isolated ourselves in the outskirts, shying away from the intimacy of our unapologetically Irish Catholic family, finding silent solidarity in our shared solitude.
   Nearing the close of the weekend, our parents sent us to a local grocery store to return the cans and bottles that had been piling up for days. Perhaps I should pause here to explain, for those of you who aren't Irish; we celebrate the lives of those we lose very traditionally.  We leave work, school and responsibility for as long as possible, retreating back to our roots to cry and reminisce and revel in the memories.  We repeat the same stories, embellishing a bit more each time, until we make legends of those we are lamentably without.  And we drink.  We drink a lot.  
   We agreed to go willingly, finding the idea of fighting the harsh, inexorable cold (he still in his stiff gray suit and I in the inappropriately short black dress I had worn guiltlessly, a tribute to Rita's advice;    "If you've got it, flaunt it.") so much easier than enduring the love, warmth, support and security of our heartbroken family.
   Eager to escape, we loaded the car and drove away.  The drive was largely a continuation of the silent rapport we'd developed as a sort of a break from the tragedy we were immersed in.  Occasionally, we spoke softly, dispassionately about music and potential plans for college.
   Getting out of the car in the parking lot, the night was numbingly cold.  "This is colder than her fucking pool." I gasped, painfully, under my breath to myself.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him smirk, though I wasn't sure if he had heard me or was adrift in his own thoughts.
   We pulled carts from a nearby stand and loaded them with bottles and cans, overflowing them and still not having enough room.  We struggled to push them through the parking lot, fighting the heartless wind.  Halfway through the trip, shaking from the cold, we stopped abruptly and looked at each other.   Brimming with repressed emotions, we threw our heads back and laughed, loudly, manically, hysterically.  Hypothermic, miserable, terrified, we laughed in anguish at the absurdity of the situation, of ourselves.  We confronted the metaphor of ourselves as the carts and the overwhelmingly abundant alcoholic litter as the tormenting grief and laughed at it.  Hard.
   We laughed frenziedly during our multiple trips back and forth from the car to the bottle returns and to the cashier as we handed in slips for $20.00 worth of $0.05 cans and bottles.  Customers stepped away to avoid us, nervous about our hysteria.  We laughed until our eyes formed tears, which slipped out the sides of our eyes and down our faces, leaving icy trails behind them.  We clutched each other, falling over, unable to suppress our lunacy and not interested in trying to.  Not bothering to even wipe away the tears, we staggered back to the car and got inside.
   We stayed in the parking lot for several minutes until we regained control of ourselves.  The drive back was rife with bouts of laughter, both of us beginning again any time we made the mistake of looking at each other.
    Arriving back at the house, we discovered our family exactly as we had left them; drunk, distraught, delirious. Too-loudly retelling stories with tears and laughter in the same breath.
   And I finally understood.