This is the begin­ning of some­thing that is unfin­ished. Partly fic­tion, partly truth.

When I was twenty, I attended a wake.

George’s father died unex­pect­edly. Me being one of his close friends, George called me sev­eral times that week to keep me updated on his father’s con­di­tion, the root and scope of which had been unknown to me prior to the week of his pass­ing. It seemed, though, accord­ing to George, that the com­pli­ca­tions arose in an out-of-the-blue sort of way, catch­ing every­one in his father’s imme­di­ate cir­cle off-guard.

The phone calls he made to me were rel­a­tively brief, on account of nei­ther of us know­ing what to say — or, more accu­rately, what, within the frame­work of our rela­tion­ship (which, before this sit­u­a­tion hadn’t weath­ered any­thing very seri­ous, aside from the occa­sional dis­cus­sion about our par­ents’ failed mar­riages and a preg­nancy scare here and there), we were allowed to say, as we weren’t equipped with the his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion or exam­ples, the tools to cre­ate and main­tain, for a period of more than a few sec­onds, a con­ver­sa­tion of that weight with­out break­ing for dead air. Our minds couldn’t bear it, and our mouths weren’t big enough. I was never sure whether he’d called for my sake or for his, but I never asked, and never pushed, feel­ing oblig­ated to fol­low his lead at all points. And so essen­tially, disappointingly:

“Yo.”

“Whatup, man.”

“He’s still sick, kinda get­tin’ worse.”

“Word?”

“Yeah, man.”

Dead air.

“Is your mom OK?”

“Yeah, she’s cool.”

“OK.”

“A’ight man.”

“A’ight man. Peace. Keep me posted.”

Days passed, things pro­gressed, and George’s father left us.

I was not at the time famil­iar with the speed at which things moved once a per­son died, and the hur­ried­ness with which tra­di­tion super­im­posed, or forced itself upon the griev­ing process, and molded and fash­ioned and fas­tened the guide­lines of that grief so that it could become, as it set­tled, some­thing mar­gin­ally, the­o­ret­i­cally tol­er­a­ble was star­tling; as was the degree of neces­sity there was in div­ing head-first into the ulti­mately inef­fec­tual nuances of cer­e­mony and func­tion. It was in that light, I now sup­pose, that I received the fatal news, and shortly there­after received the details of the wake and the funeral — which, to my sur­prise, was being held in the States, in Brook­lyn no less, and not on the land of that birthed George’s father.