YAPPING WITH THE DEPARTED

It Sucks Being Dead at Your 50th Birthday Party

My son asked me if my friend’s family was cursed

Yesterday I went to Lisa’s 50th birthday party. She’s been dead for less than a year. When she died several unexpectedly months ago, a sinkhole devoured the middle of our town. It seemed like.

How do you fill a sinkhole? You don’t.

When Lisa lost her young son several years before her own death, she kept everything in his room the same. No one blamed or questioned her stop time. Obviously.

No one said move on. Thank God.

She spent most of her time outside, walking and talking to everyone. She knew everything about everyone without owning a cell phone. She knew people's phone numbers, addresses, and birthdays without technology. Yes, it’s possible.

We did it, remember?

“Too many bad things happen to that family,” my son said. “Do you think they’re cursed?”

This statement gave me the chills. I had just finished a book about a cursed family. Having just read it, I was more vulnerable to believing in curses.

“Not cursed,” I said to my son. “Bad luck.”

“Bad luck is when you step in a mud puddle and lose a shoe,” my son said, “Not when your child dies and then you die.”

I nodded. He wasn’t wrong, but I don’t know how to talk to my son about cursed families. I wasn’t qualified.

After Lisa died, her friends collected money to dedicate a bench to Lisa and her dead son. It’s a perfect place to sit and talk to Lisa, but I would rather it were her than a bench.

Her bench was placed beside another boy’s bench, a local teen who died three months after Lisa. It is a beautiful view of the lake with two tragically sad benches.

I walked with my friend, Janis, to Lisa’s 50th birthday which took place near the benches. Janis was close to Lisa, Lisa’s son, and the other boy. Janis said it was good that Lisa and her son’s bench were so close to the other boy’s bench.

“Lisa will watch over those boys,” she said. “She’d want to, and her son will have someone to play with in heaven.”

My grandma didn’t like that my mother, her daughter, had raised us without the idea of heaven. My grandma once said to me, “What will you do when someone you love dies? How will you manage it without heaven?”

That made my heart sink, but the truth is I always believed in something beyond. I can’t describe it, but my father’s been dead for over twenty years and I talk to him all the time.

He's there, wherever there is. It never occurred to me he couldn’t hear me from where that was, so it must be somewhere.

Lisa and her son’s bench was welded to the ground just in time for Lisa’s 50th birthday, so we held her party there.

“What should I wear?” I asked my friend Janis.

“I don’t think there are rules,” she said, “about what you can wear to a dead girl’s birthday party.”

We laughed because we knew Lisa would think that was funny. She had a morbid sense of humor.

Lisa loved schadenfreude — maybe because she had suffered the greatest loss of all. Let someone else have some misfortune, she probably felt.

At some point during the birthday party, I realized I had lost my phone. I futilely attempted to call it several times with another woman’s phone. My search ended there, however, because it didn’t seem right to question the birthday guests about my missing phone, like some uninvited detective.

I wondered if a distracted sad guest had absently picked it up. I searched under the boxes that carried food and flowers that people brought.

The woman who’d lent me her phone suggested I have my husband ping my phone from home. When he pinged my phone’s location, he said “It says your phone is here.”

Because I had just finished reading a book with supernatural elements, I imagined my phone magically reappeared in my house. It creeped me out.

“Are you sure you didn’t leave it here?” My husband said. A more logical theory than a poltergeist.

“No,” I answered. “I bought a latte at Starbucks on my way here. “Maybe you’re pinging the wrong phone.”

I heard him running down our stairs, the ping volume increasing as he stomped.

“I have it!” he called out. “Someone put it in the doorway.”

I felt a chill.

I could see the ghost or angel of Lisa picking up my phone and delivering it to my house. In life, she was such a beautiful busybody. In death, who knew what she was capable of? Pranks for sure.

It made perfect sense that Lisa would attend her own 50th birthday party. She might have been late, but she’d swing by. She liked people most of the time.

Maybe when the specter version of Lisa approached her 50th birthday party, she observed my phone falling out of my pocket. She‘d think it was hilarious to transport my phone to my doorway without a note or explanation. Maybe, the religious part of her believed it might reinforce my faith in humanity.

“It’ll totally freak her out,” I could hear her say, laughing.

Her son and the boy from the other bench would be standing beside her.

Maybe her son would say, “Mom! I can’t believe you. Just put it in her pocket!”

The other boy might say, “You’re funny! My mom never did anything like that!”

I looked up in the sky and quietly thanked Lisa for delivering my phone.

“Who found it?” my friend Janis asked me.

“Lisa,” I said.

“Oh, is she there?” Janis asked, referring to our other friend Lisa.

“No,” I said, gesturing to the sky. “Li-sa.”

“Ooooh,” she said, looking up. “That Lisa.”

I didn’t use to believe in curses, but when I said goodbye to Lisa's husband, he told me he had cancer. He’d just started chemo that past week. I didn’t ask about the prognosis.

How was that even possible? He had lost one son. Then a wife. Now he was sick. I refused to acknowledge the possibility that this family could lose one more person.

At Lisa’s 50th birthday party, there were people there from every part of her brief life. Kindergarten friends, work friends, neighborhood friends, school friends, friends of her children, people she’d met on the street, relatives. I met many of them at her funeral which seemed both a decade away and the day before.

Lisa’s father, who shared her luminous smile and golden complexion, was shuffling towards the party. My heart ached watching him. We had talked at the funeral and his smile had perplexed me. His warmth had singed me.

Lisa’s father was dressed exactly like Freddy Krueger. Not the mask but the identical hat and the sweater.

If Lisa had been there, I’d have asked her, “Why is your dad dressed like Freddy Krueger?”

She would have burst out laughing. Her joy was fast, ready.

When her very hard-of-hearing father heard her laugh, he would have asked her, “What did she say, Lisa?”

Lisa would have placed her hand on her dad’s back and said, “DAD! SHE SAID YOU WERE DRESSED LIKE FREDDY KREUGER!”

And he would have said, “Who?”

And she would have laughed again and said, “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, DAD! IT’S FINE.”

And he would have shaken his head because it sucks being old and deaf and missing parts of conversations.

But you know what sucks even more? Being dead at your 50th birthday party. That’s not fair. None of this is fair. I wanted to say to my son, yes, they are cursed, but what was the point?

Next week, I’m going back to Lisa’s bench and talking to her about how unfair this all is. She’s always been a great listener.

Thank you to Debra G. Harman for having the perfect home for my work.