Grandma Recorded Every Funeral She Ever Attended — The Last Tape in the Box Has My Name on It

Nobody knew she did it. That's the thing I keep coming back to. My grandmother attended what I can only estimate was somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty funerals across her lifetime, and she recorded every single one of them on cassette tape, and she never mentioned it to a single person in our family. Not once. My mother didn't know. My aunt, who lived forty minutes away and saw her twice a month, didn't know. I didn't know.

We found the box in her bedroom closet, behind a hanging organizer full of winter sweaters that still smell like her. It's a shoebox, the old kind with the thin cardboard lid, and inside it are cassettes packed in so tightly that you have to ease them out sideways. Each one is labeled in her handwriting — small, slanted, the cursive she learned in the forties and never abandoned. A name, a date, a church or funeral home. Dottie Hargrove, March 1981, First Methodist. Ray Caulfield, October 1989, Sunrise Chapel. On and on, all the way back to 1983, which seems to be when she started, based on the oldest date I found. She would have been fifty-two.

Photo: Sunrise Chapel, via cdn.pixabay.com

Photo: First Methodist, via ghosty-production.s3.amazonaws.com

I don't know why she started. I don't know what the recordings contain exactly, because I've only listened to one of them — Dottie Hargrove, March 1981, which turned out to be a full service, organ and all, with the minister's voice clear and my grandmother's breathing just barely audible underneath everything, steady and close to the microphone. She must have held the recorder in her lap. She must have sat there in the pew with this machine running and her hands folded over it and her face arranged the way you arrange your face at funerals, and nobody ever noticed.

I counted eighty-seven tapes. I was going to listen to more of them, work my way through them slowly, try to understand what she was doing and why. I thought maybe it was grief, or memory, or some private theology about bearing witness that she'd never found the words to explain. I was prepared to sit with the strangeness of it and come out the other side with something like understanding.

And then I got to the last tape in the box.

It was at the bottom, loose, not packed in with the others. The label is in her handwriting, the same slant, the same ink. The date on it is three weeks from today. I've checked the calendar four times. Three weeks from today, a Thursday in late spring.

The name on the label is mine.

I want to be careful about how I write this next part, because I've gone over it in my head enough times that I'm worried about sounding like I'm performing something I'm not actually feeling. But the truth is I sat on the floor of her closet for a long time before I did anything else. Long enough that my mother came looking for me and I had to hold the tape against my leg so she wouldn't see the label.

I listened to it that night, alone, after everyone had gone to bed.

It's a funeral service. Full length, maybe forty minutes. The recording quality is the same as the others — ambient room sound, an organ, a minister whose voice I don't recognize speaking about a life well lived and a soul gone home. There are hymns. There are pauses where I assume people are crying, though the microphone doesn't quite pick that up. There is a eulogy.

The eulogy is specific. It mentions things about me that are accurate — my childhood, a trip I took, something I said to my grandmother the last time I saw her that I didn't think anyone else heard. The voice delivering it belongs to someone I know. I'm not going to write down who.

At the very end of the tape, after what sounds like a recessional, there are maybe fifteen seconds of silence. And then my grandmother's voice, close to the microphone, the way it always is on these recordings, says: I'm sorry, honey. I thought about not putting this one in the box.

Then it ends.

I've been trying to figure out what she meant by that. Whether she meant she recorded it knowing I'd find it, or whether she recorded it and then decided to include it anyway for a reason I can't work out. Whether she knew something or whether she was doing what she always did — bearing witness, just slightly ahead of schedule.

Three weeks is a Thursday. I don't have any plans for that Thursday. I've been trying not to make any.