Shanzhai Lu

Someone who recently lost a loved one got me thinking today about something I regret doing during my own grieving process.

It took over a year for me to delete my sister's voice mails and only a second to wish I hadn't as soon as I did it.

A very surreal moment.

At the time, there was absolutely nothing comforting about hearing her voice. All it did was make me burst into tears. Even just knowing it was saved in my mailbox creeped me out. I did a pretty good job ignoring it. But every so often a Pandora's Box effect would kick in and I couldn't help but replay it.

Sometimes I did it because I wanted to remember a time in my life when she was alive and things were normal.

And of course, as soon as I did I'd fall to pieces because all it did was remind me that she was gone.

Other times I know a part of me was trying to test myself to see if the passing of time made it easier for me to listen to them.

It didn't.

This kind of back and forth went on for over a year. Until one day I remember feeling like I couldn't take it anymore. My son was a few months old by then and I became focused -- ok, more like obsessed -- with getting over the grieving process. It was a really simple decision for an emotionally impulsive person. I wanted to get rid of anything in my life that made me sad.

So one of the first thing I did was delete those voice mails.

I wish I hadn't as soon as I did.

Fast forward to right now. I miss those voice mails. There was nothing really profound about them. Just the regular type of voice mails busy big sisters leave for little sisters when they're calling to check in for no particular reason. Most of hers were usually left while stuck in traffic and bored. But a few of the more recent ones were what I call the "bridezilla" voice mails because she took her life just a month after her wedding.

Hearing someone address you by name in their own voice. There's a connection there that I think we take for granted. For me, it's a reminder of a time when she was alive and things were normal.

I deleted that.

I first wrote this back in May. It was inspired by reflections of my sister's life and death. A few months after her suicide in 2004, I found a journal she had kept during her depression. On a few pages she had noted the things she had said she wanted to do one day when she made enough money or had enough time.

Kind of sad that fear of not having enough held her back from doing things that would've given her more by way of meaning, purpose and balance.

Pushing Proverbial Pencils

I don’t care who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done or what you’re doing now.

We all have stories of our lives we want to write. Big life changing ideas in our minds of things we want to do one day. Things we’d like to be doing now but don’t have the time or resources for. Things we’d do in a heartbeat if things were different for us or if the opportunity presented itself.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around and tell ourselves we’ll get to writing one day.

And then time passes.

And we’re too busy with the life we have to live to start writing the story of our life we want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves that now’s not the right time to start writing the story of our life because maybe our pencils aren’t sharp enough. Yea, that’s it. We need more time to sharpen our pencils. We want the story to be perfect.

And then more time passes.

And we tell ourselves the time isn’t right to start writing the words we really want to say because we’re too busy living the life we THINK we’re supposed to live in order to eventually get around to living the life we really want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves we have to make more money and gain more experience in order to start writing the story of our life.  Besides, we haven’t found the right paper. We don’t even know if we have the right pencils. We want it to be perfect. We’re not ready to start writing yet.

And then more time passes.

And our pencils start getting old and start looking a bit dull

…along with the ideas we wanted to write about.

And the reality of this sets in along with the regret.

And we pound the desk real hard out of frustration.

And some pencils fly off the desk in different directions.

One lands in the trash can next to us.

Another rolls under our desk and out of sight.

Another falls straight down and breaks its sharpened tip as it hits the floor.

And then more time passes.

And then life passes.

…leaving sharpened pencils and perfect blank pieces of paper strewn around a desk with a now empty chair.

Sad thought? Yes.

The end? No.

Just start writing.

Anything. Unrehearsed. Off the top of your head. In the direction you want to go.

Complete with typos and bad grammar.

And go ahead and talk out loud as you write so people can hear you. The story gets even better that way.

See, the problem is — and the problem that Susie had — is thinking that the story of your life needs to be written by you alone in the form of a big huge book that no one’s ever going to buy, read or share with others if it’s not perfect. So you proofread it in your mind indefinitely. And the world misses out.

Pushing pencils around a desk is a waste of time.

Just start writing.

Now.

Proofread later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do. And so do you.

In the days following Susie's suicide in 2004, I felt like finding a quiet place to hide where I could just cry my fucking eyes out, scream at the world, blame myself for not saving her and feel sorry for myself for the rest of my life -- all at the same time. But there was no time for that. My parents were completely devastated. There was a funeral to plan and there was no way my little sister Diana and I were going to put them through that so we got to work.

You learn a lot about the business of death when you're planning a funeral for the first time. For starters, it's a very profitable sector. There are different funeral homes to choose from offering different package prices and a la carte options. You learn that caskets are like cars. They come in all makes and models and the funeral director is well versed in the art of the upsell. Before you know it, you've been upsold on a really nice cherry colored wood casket. You choose a service package that's all planned out for you because you don't want to deal with the details. You even opt for spending the money for an upgraded tombstone. And you also find yourself shopping around for a cemetery plot and feeling the pressure to pick out the nicest final resting place you can afford. And you have to make all these decisions and spend all this money in the span of a few days.

When we decided on burying Susie at Rose Hills, we thought it'd be as simple as making an appointment at their office and taking a look at some map of available plots, choosing a few to see and picking one all in the same day. Not quite. It's just like buying a home. There are real estate agents who have access to cemetery plot inventories in a second hand market where someone decided - rightfully so - that it was a good business to buy up a bunch of plots at prime locations and resell them at a higher rate. Their prices fluctuate by season and are negotiable. Oh, and of course the funeral director you're working with has a list of "preferred sales agents" they work with and everyone makes money at the end of the day off referral fees for your grief. Who knew right? Diana and I didn't.

The first agent we met with was a nice woman who looked and acted like a real estate agent selling a house. In a suit. Very professional with her list of inventory on hand with different prices and selling points on why one plot was better than another. Diana and I looked at a few and found one we liked (the one above that i took a shot of today) but there was some parts of Rose Hills she didn't have access to and we felt the need to shop around and compare prices and plots with another agent.

I really don't remember how we got the contact info for the second agent. These memories are five years old and it's of a time I would rather forget so details get lost. But there we were. Day two of shopping for a cemetery plot for Susie and we're told to wait at a certain section of Rose Hills. So we're sitting in our cars waiting. And it sucks. And cemeteries really suck. And we're tired. And we're quiet and just trying to process the grief that we've been trying to hold off on feeling for the past few days so we can do this one last favor for our sister and make sure she has the best casket, funeral and final resting place that she deserves. And we're sitting in this car and an old white pick up truck pulls up. And a tall old guy with a ponytail and beard gets out of the car wearing worn out jeans and a ratty t-shirt with a piece of paper in his hand. Diana and I at this point are giving each other the WTF look. Yup, this was the other agent showing us another group of plots to choose from.

He was totally weird. Even more so because the first thing he did after introducing himself to us was go to the back of his pick up truck and take out a big freakin' shovel. Again, Diana and I are giving each other the WTF look. So we follow this guy around and he's staring at his piece of paper and trying to locate the plots he's supposed to show us. Walking all over the tombstones with his dirty boots and shovel in hand when we've been trying to be respectful and walk around them. It turns out the shovel is used for digging up a bit of grass that grows over the numbers of the cemetery plots.

But seriously. Imagine two Chinese girls following this old bummy looking guy around who's carrying a shovel and digging up  random little parts of the cemetery while other people around us are paying their respect to other grave sites and giving us weird looks. Totally weird.

So it turns out this guy didn't really have any plots we really liked compared to the one the first agent showed us the day before. No big deal. Just another day in his life doing his job really. So we walk back to his pick up truck and our car and he's scribbling notes on that piece of paper for us to keep in case we change our minds and Diana starts elbowing my arm as we're standing there saying "look at his license plate. So I looked at his license plate and OMG I wanted to laugh.

So this dude gets in his pick up truck and drives off. Diana and I get in our cars and for the first time in the days since our sister died, we started laughing out loud. Seriously. Just cracking up in the car at this weird guy who sells cemetery plots for a living driving around in a white pick up truck with a license plate that said:

DIGHER.