Mourners

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It was a small, private funeral at the Glade Brothers Mortuary in Daly City. Different in all respects from the two funerals the day before. Both of those had been large affairs held in San Francisco, one in a funeral home in the Marina and the other at Mission Dolores.

The bereaved were still gathering when we got there. Half a dozen cars were parked in the adjacent lot, and there were little knots of ethnically mixed individuals outside the mortuary’s entrance; the age and makes of the cars and the mourners’ dark suits and dark dresses said they were a low-income group. Troxell went straight inside, as on the other occasions, without speaking or acknowledging anybody, but this time I didn’t tag along to watch him view the remains and then sit like a rock in one of the pews throughout the service. I dislike funerals in principle; honoring the dead should be a personal and private act, not a ritualistic public spectacle. And I’d already exceeded my low tolerance level for dirge music, the sweet cloying scent of flowers, faces ravaged by pain and grief. I stayed in the car, wishing for maybe the twentieth time that Jake Runyon hadn’t been too busy to pull this duty, and called Tamara at the agency to fill her in.

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