I was fourteen the first time I had a funeral to go to. My father, of course, kept his face still, preserved his posture, tightened and loosened his fists, cracked his neck, exhaled loud as a whoosh of a street sweeper. My mother’s face was pale and still, her eyes half shut, cried out the night before. Little Maria, at eight years old, stood alongside her stoic mother, Olga, and watched her father sink into a rectangular hole in the ground. Serge’s brother Pavel was, of course, hung over. He was the only one crying, his enormous shoulders shaking like a tent in heavy rain. That’s how I imagined the five of them as I waited in Serge’s old minivan, looking the other way at rows of gravestones in the flattened grass.

I sat quietly, breathed onto the cold windows, rewound a few years to when Serge, having joined a local basketball league for overweight, middle-aged men, was showing off by attempting to spin a watermelon on his finger. A beautiful watermelon that went crack and splat onto our patio, seeds shooting out like beetles. Maria cried – she’d been looking forward to it all day. She plopped down next to it, stuck her hands in its bright, pink insides, cried even harder. It took Serge close to an hour to hose it all down. He started up the sprinkler, threw Maria onto his back and ran through it at least a dozen times. She squealed and laughed with her eyes closed and her hands wrapped around his neck. Serge was just one of those people who knew how to make things right again.

Olga and Maria approached the car first, my mother and father followed, Pavel trailed behind with an unlit cigarette. My mother gave me a nasty look, shook her head, motioned to Maria. That brave little girl can handle it and you can’t, she seemed to say. I never really gave her a reason for staying in the car, just a simple “I can’t,” after each “But you have to.” At the time I wasn’t quite so sure what made me so sick about funerals, made me reject them with my whole body – a glass of whole milk to my lactose intolerance. I suppose I should have left the car, been there for the sake of support as is customary. I wonder what they thought of me – a disrespectful teenager who’d rather not waste time on supporting those in grief, who’d rather text her friends to meet up for a movie or get giddy over uncensored hip-hop. Maybe they thought it bored me to stand and watch and say nothing. I didn’t dare defend myself; it wasn’t a thing to be discussed, just for everyone to silently mull over, to judge me. It all felt very wrong to me, to have the funeral as the last thing to remember about Serge (or anyone, really) – I couldn’t bring myself to see it.

No one says that misery loves company and means it as a good thing; it comes to unsettle us, unhinge us, and we hate to feel it alone because it makes us feel unbearably human, mortal, weak. And so we bask in it, hold hands, pat shoulders, apologize for the lack of adequate words. Death is personal for everyone and therein somehow turns into the least personal thing in the world: when it resides in our proximity, it is instantaneously ours – ours to fear, to imagine unto ourselves. We sit at a funeral and wonder what it must be like to die, what happens afterwards, whether we’ll drown or crumble at the hands of some disease, escape the vision of a drunk driver and at a crosswalk, fail to escape a fire. We are consumed by this – we think of those who’ve wronged us, imagine how they’ll feel if we die, picture the objects of our unrequited love doused in regret. But one can’t dwell too long on this because the truth sets in: you can’t come back from this; the price of seeing people react to your death is, after all, death. And here dying loses its appeal. But the allure is always there – to die without dying, to die and come back, and perhaps, for the more twisted of us – to stage it all and see what happens. We sit, a slew of selfish passengers, and think away without a scrap of guilt because it’s fine to grieve here, to grieve in silence, to keep our thoughts from others. Maybe we really do all grieve equally, maybe I am heartless to despise funerals so much. But I refuse to accept them nonetheless, refute the notion of collecting around a corpse, allowing it – not “him” or “her” – to channel all our darkness, to remind us of our own mortality.

After Serge passed my father had to get an Ambien prescription. Olga sold the house and moved to New York to finish medical school, which she had abandoned for marriage and a child. Last I heard, she was dating a pediatric surgeon who was sleeping with half of the staff. After a while she and my mother ceased to be friends, divided by the jealousy that arose at presence of my father. The unifying powers of the funeral meant nothing, were sucked dry the day of, lingered vaguely through the remainder of the week. To this day I’m glad I never went, never had to see Serge motionless, pale, descending into a pit of dirt. I still have a t-shirt he gave me – it has a photo of a pickup and says “It’s all about truckin’,” which never ceases to make me laugh. I remember the watermelon scattered across our patio in the summer sunset, Maria’s joyous shrieks as the pair of them plunged through the sprinkler, the way he would drink champagne at the close of a party “to sober up.”

Grieving the loss of those close to us is one thing – we are left with a palpable gap, obstacles to overcome – but grieving the loss of an acquaintance or a stranger is an entirely different animal.

The night of Cole’s death, every single family in our class got a phone call from Ms. Kennedy or Principal Connor. My best friend Mira and I stayed on the phone for three hours, looking at bird’s-eye-view photos of the accident, his little white car crushed like a balled up piece of paper between the road and the woods. We wondered what to do, whether to relay our condolences to his family, his girlfriend, his friends, whether to write “R.I.P.” in our Facebook status. The next day we shuffled into the assembly hall in silence, listened to the principal tell us how it all happened – no seatbelt, music blasting, turkey sub in one hand, speeding on that one road behind the school to go airborne at that one bump where all the seniors did it as some messed-up rite of passage. He’d been trailing another car of students, they saw him in the rearview mirror, smacking into a station wagon about to turn into its driveway. A mother, a boy our age, two little girls, the younger of whom broke a finger – the rest of them made it out just fine. The father was pulling in after work minutes later, checked on his family and ran to Cole, who was past saving, mangled in the back seat.

We went to class and sat in silence, people who knew him sat with their heads on their desks, asked to be excused, went to his locker. Cookies were laid out in the common room. The clerks in the mailroom printed photos of Cole in his bright red soccer uniform until their printers ran out of ink, stapled them to every bulletin board, taped them to lockers, windows, walls. The morning after Cole died, I left my history class to stand in the hallway by his locker, watched his girlfriend collapse on the floor. I recall wanting to cry more than anything. But crying seemed wrong, too, as if only those who were truly close to Cole had the right. I just watched everyone else, held hands with Mira, knowing full well that both of us were at a loss for adequate emotions.

The next day buses lined the parking lot, ready to take everyone to the service – a spot for single student and teacher in the Upper School. I didn’t know one thing about Cole except for that he wore a diamond stud in each ear, loved Donnie Darko and took his girlfriend’s virginity on the varsity soccer field. His English teacher read a poem he wrote for class. It was awful, but everybody cried and deemed him a literary prodigy. I looked around at faces of people who were and weren’t close to him. I guess we were all close, in a sense – a hundred or so people per class, down to ninety-eight in ours after two kids lost their scholarships and went to public school. We all knew each other’s names, who was friends with who, who kissed at the Halloween dance. I hadn’t had a single class with Cole, knew him peripherally, and it filled me with a ridiculous amount of guilt – it felt completely morally wrong to be there. But I had no choice, it would have been disrespectful not to – the same way it was disrespectful to sit in the car at Serge’s funeral. But I could handle my family’s disappointment more so than that of the whole student body – I didn’t want to be that one girl who didn’t go. No one cried too loudly; we just gaped at one another, realizing the frailty of life despite our youth, feeling sorry for his parents, who had no other children and wondering if we’d have any homework due that week.

Throughout the service I was anxious, restless, hating the small town church we all squeezed into, hating the people who, like me, didn’t know Cole at all, weren’t his friends, barely acquaintances. I was so unbelievably angry, outraged at Cole’s stupidity. Who drives without a goddamned seatbelt? As far as danger goes, it’s not “cool” the way it can be “cool” to have a cigarette. How proudly, upon turning eighteen (something Cole never got to do) we’d all head over to Wawa during lunch to buy a pack, flash our license, feel adult. We all speed on occasion, but who’s dumb enough to do that with no seatbelt and while eating and blasting music? As reckless as it gets. What if he had killed someone in the other car? It was as if he had to die to demonstrate that innocence trumps teenage recklessness.

On Cole’s locker, someone wrote “An Angel Got His Wings,” which became the caption for Cole’s page in the yearbook. Suddenly, upon dying, Cole had become angelic, someone for the rest of us to look up to – a soccer star, a poet, a perfect friend, a perfect son. It unsettled me to think that someone need be idolized upon being gone – as if we’re putting on a show to demonstrate the way we see the best in people, as if we’re eaten at by the guilt of not being as close or as kind to someone as we could have been, tormented by our own shortfall to the point of being able to produce words of pity and praise alone. It would seem cruel to suggest the caption for his yearbook page to be “Be careful” or “Drive safely” but those seem infinitely more relevant and sane. Perhaps we’ve learned his lesson, are all more careful when we drive, but I have my doubts. We used the death as our own vehicle for gloom, for deep thought. I’d like to think it matured the lot of us, but within a short time we were all back to stupid pranks and dares and recklessness.

The night of the funeral I went home and thought about the father, who immediately ran to save Cole, but couldn’t and, finally, I cried. That was something to collect ourselves around, to dwell on – a man’s heroic practicality, something that in the present, something to live up to, to thank the stars for.

It has struck me as odd the way death can string together strangers, negate all lengths of distance, serve as a magnet – a multiplier, even – for sadness. I suppose there’s nothing odd about it, really – it’s just one of those things the whole world has to share – we arrive, breathe, eat and all leave. Why not, when we’re presented with an opportunity to share, let such a thing bring us together?

Last summer my grandfather passed away just two weeks before we were supposed to fly out to Moscow and visit him. My father packed his bags nervously, called U.S. Airways, took the next flight. Everyone knew – it was in the papers, on the television. Everyone called at odd hours of the night, had forgotten the time difference. He was everyone’s to share – a public figure whose portrait, always with a pipe, was everyone’s to know, to remember. My father dreaded the funeral, hated formalities just as his father had, hated all the hands he’d have to shake – professors, politicians, maybe even Medvedev. A telegram arrived from Putin three days later – his “condolences to Viacheslav Glazychev’s wife Elena, their son Leonid, and his granddaughter Sophia.” Elena was my grandfather’s second wife, not my father’s mother. But what did it matter when we had received a telegram from Vladimir Putin himself?

Elena never spoke to anyone in the family, and, upon seeing me for the first time ever that summer said “Hmm…what an odd combination of genes” and “You’re shorter than I expected.” I was at once the best and worst thing for her grieving process – she saw in me her inexistent motherhood, a thing that never bothered her before, perhaps, but suddenly was relevant. But in me was an inevitable part of him, and for that, she was thankful. She had alienated everyone, lived the life of a hermit. My mother says it was because she was so beautiful when she was young, she wanted to be remembered as her youthful self, didn’t want the world to see her age, to see her gain wait, to hear her struggle with her inhaler. My father told me the two of them, having very minimal contact prior to the funeral, bonded quite well there in their mutual distaste for official procedure, the impersonal routine that someone with no will and ties to academia and politics was subject to. At the viewing, Elena approached the open casket, gazed briefly inside, whispered “That’s not him” to my father and walked away while hundreds of attendees offered endless condolences as she went and pitied her to no end.

So who, then, was the funeral for, if not for those closest to my grandfather? What purpose does a formal framework serve in regard to grief, to death? We each let go in different ways – we cry or don’t, make casseroles, consume them ravenously or stick them indefinitely into a fridge. If we don’t want to dress in black or stand and stare blankly at the empty vessel of a former loved one, we should not. And we should not feel guilty for not wanting what has been culturally prescribed to us as adequate closure. Let us each decide what to write into the end credits: perhaps we want to write “The End” redundantly in block letters; or maybe we would like to fade into a lush landscape, a sunset; or, perhaps, we simply want to play the highlight reel on repeat.