11/16b

Ah, yes. My mother’s funeral. What a lovely event it was.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that maybe—just maybe—they’d be compassionate. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you just think they’d say to themselves you know, she’s obviously grieving, and it’s a good thing she’s got someone to stand beside her and hold her up in her hour of need? I mean, it’s not like I had a family or anything. It’s not like they were ever there for me—even when my dad died, or when I got divorced, or anything else.
No, they all just stood there looking at us—looking at Damien standing beside me, thinking their hateful little thoughts. Aunt Ronnie even came to me and informed me that my mother would have been ashamed of me, bringing “that man” to her funeral.
And—I’ll admit it—she was right. Which is about the only thing you’ll EVER hear me admit to being “right” about Aunt Ronnie, or Uncle Bill, or Uncle Rich, or Aunt Cyn, or any of their upwardly-mobile kids. Or anyone else on Mom’s side of the family. But Mom would have killed me if she knew I brought Damien to her funeral. But see, she didn’t know—she didn’t have any say in it.
I know—a petty revenge, right? A petty revenge against a poor old murdered widow-lady for not giving me a pony when I was little, or for not telling me I was her favorite, or whatever. Well, if my revenge is petty, it’s also mine. And no one knows what it’s for, either.
Bringing Damien wasn’t revenge, though. Bringing Damien was my hedge against the horror of it all. Damien was my wall—he stood between me and those people with all their questions, those people with all their cameras. “How do you feel?” they would ask me. How the fuck do you THINK I feel, you microphone-wielding ass? My mother was stabbed eleven times. I would never say that, of course. They all think I’d say something just exactly like that, but I never would. But I’d let Damien say it for me, if the opportunity arose.
So Damien stood beside me, uncomfortable in his only suit and tie, towering over everyone else in the room and holding back more weight and memories than he will ever know. God bless him, I say.
Yeah, I know. “Not your mother’s God, that’s for sure...” Aunt Ronnie said that too. Well, there’s another reason not to go to church, if I was looking--my mother’s God was apparently a racist, too, along with being a murderer and a right-wing bigot. Cool, I say.
I’ve had enough of family. I’ve had enough of funerals. First Daddy, then Grandpa Bill a year after that, and Grandma; then Gabriel. I’d have had enough of funerals at that point no matter if no one on Earth had ever died before. My sweet, sweet Gabriel.
Of course, they never knew about Gabriel. They take it as an article of faith that Damien is the one they’ve been referring to for all these years as “that man Grace is with”, but they’re wrong. Damien has only been around for twelve, fifteen months. Gabriel was there for three and a half years.
So of course, they blame Damien for the things they think they know about me. They blame Damien for the things my mother told them about me. “Oh, THAT’s the one who got her started.” “THAT’s the one who gave her the drugs.” They think they know. They think I had nothing to do with it, that I was led astray. That fits in with what they like to think of themselves—that nothing that ever came from them could be bad, could be wrong, could be corrupted.