Today I went to a funeral for a nine-year-old boy.
I'm not going to round up to ten for him; his birthday was less than a week away, but I'm not going to give him credit for those last few days because I just want to highlight the injustice and tragedy and incredulity of anyone ever having to attend a funeral for a nine-year-old boy.
Kyle is now definitely on his way to Heaven. My experiences with death have led me to develop my own belief that one does not arrive there inside the half-moment following death, but that an individual journey needs to be made, depending on what that person learned in their time on Earth and how much time they had to learn it. Being that Kyle was all of nine and possessed an inordinate amount of wisdom and understanding for his age, I'm sure his journey will be relatively quick.
He was a funny little guy. I met him as a first grader when I had his older sister in my class. I'd see him at the end of the day waiting in line for his bus, and if I was quick enough I could catch him unaware and pull his stocking cap down over his eyes. While most kids would quickly yank it back up off of their face and point an accusing finger at me, Kyle just accepted that I got him and stood there with the cap over his eyes, letting out a defeated little cry that was engineered to make every other kid in the bus line laugh. After awhile he figured out my pattern and started watching for me. Or set friends on guard to watch for me. Or just stood in the bus line as long as it took with both hands clenched to the top of his head, just in case I came by that day, ready to announce with triumph, "Can't get me!"
As the months and years went by and the cancer he had fought back earlier in his young life returned, I felt a pull. He wasn't just another little brother or sister of a student anymore, not just someone I would joke around with but someone I started watching. I'd give him bits of encouragement when he looked like he needed it, joke with him when he needed cheering up. I watched his sister. I knew what it was like to have a little sister suffering with that disease, and what it was like to watch her die. I watched his sister to see how she was going to handle the return.
When the school year ended and his sister moved on to the middle school, she still came back to visit, more frequently than a lot of kids would because her brother was still at my school and she had a reason to occasionally come by. Kyle went in for some massive treatment to chase off the disease again and missed a lot of school. We felt his absence while he was being tutored at night by someone set up through the district. And eventually, he came back.
But the remission didn't last. And in only a matter of months the disease had fought back, and another intense round of treatment was ordered up, one that would keep him out of school for at least a good month, not to mention several sporadic days and weeks after that while his body regained strength. And I felt the pull again. As soon as I'd heard he would need homebound tutoring again, I told his homeroom teacher to let the family know I would do it. Another teacher in our building was also willing to help him, but, to be blunt, I staked a claim and more or less elbowed her aside. I had the relationship with the family she didn't. I had known Kyle longer than she had and I knew him better. I knew his sister Kiana and wanted to hover somewhat close to keep an eye on how she would be dealing with everything. And I knew that if something like this came up, my sister would want me to be involved. I wasn't feeling a pull anymore. I was feeling compelled.
My colleague graciously stepped aside and I was on board. I went to his house in the evenings, usually for an hour or two depending on what his schedule was like. There were good days and bad ones. There were nights we would focus hard on the math that came so easily for him and butt heads a little about the reading he didn't really want to do. There were times he was feeling playful and goofy, and I had to find ways to persuade him to stay busy. There were times his pain took over everything and we were lucky to get anything done before the stress wore him out and put him to sleep on the living room sofa. One night I sat on the floor with him, his sister, and the babysitter, while Kyle rolled back and forth in Kiana's lap, not having much luck trying to find a position he could rest in that wouldn't hurt, unable to focus on much else or to even communicate with any of us. Kiana just held him and told him he'd be okay. His sitter, their neighbor, gently tried over and over and over to get him to lie on the sofa. I sat and pet the dog, Shelby, so she wouldn't get excited by all of Kyle's moving and crying and think he was trying to play with her.
And that night wasn't even the worst one.
But there were great times, too. He'd try and get me to sneak downstairs and play Wii, as if his mother wouldn't hear from the next room that we weren't working anymore. More than once he tried to talk me into helping him prank Kiana, and we finally did once on her birthday; their mother and her friends captured the moment on cell phone cameras, and his smile was as wide as it could have been. We played some Nintendo DS. We set up Star Wars action figures around the work space on the dining room table. We found that the only way we could get Shelby the dog to stop barking at us for attention was to take the battery-powered massage ball that he used to relieve muscle tension and hold it right on her butt.
He died October 9th, which, oddly enough, was the same date my sister had been buried five years earlier. Our school had parent-teacher conferences the night of his visitation so I skipped my dinner break and sped (literally) to the funeral home, getting there with just enough time to cut my way past at least 150 people to see him in his casket surrounded by his favorite toys and to talk briefly with his mom before I had to speed back for my next conference. Which I made.
His funeral, today, was something that about ten people from our school attended; our principal had put out a call to available licensed staff in the district to volunteer and fill in for those of us attending; she said later she'd had so many volunteers she could have had the entire school staff covered. It was a difficult funeral to attend. I didn't feel much sadness for him because I knew the worst of it was over for him now and he was on his way to meet up with my sister and hundreds of other souls waiting to celebrate his arrival. I did feel great sadness for his family, particularly his mom and his sister. They seemed so lost, and having been in that spot myself I knew where they were and what they still have ahead of them.
I cried a little when his best friend walked up to eulogize him with a poem she had written; knowing what it's like to deliver a eulogy, I can tell you that she did an admirable job of getting through it and keeping her emotion in check as much as she could. For me the defining moment, the perfect moment of the service was the very end, when the pallbearers came forward to bring his body outside. The picked up the casket, turned around to face down the aisle, and the closing music, which I found out later Kyle had chosen himself, started playing through the church's sound system:
The main title theme from "Star Wars."
