Chapter 202: Day 201

Day 201,

Mists are out.  Time to change clothes and get ready for the funeral.  Slept fitfully enough last night that I didn’t need Cass to wake me this time.

I considered switching to a new journal for this entry like I did after one hundred, but decided against it.  Last time around I only had enough pages leftover for maybe two or three more days’ worth, but with most of these entries being shorter I’ve got more like twenty or thirty days’ worth left in here and it seems like too much of a waste not to use them.

 

Just finished with the official record of the service and related matters and then got dinner.  Took a fair bit longer than last time, partly because despite having no family Miranda had considerably more people eulogizing her than Bartolome did and partly because following the service I had to meet with the mediator handling the matter to get the record of how her possessions would be handled.

All four of the current crystal collectors were there with something to say about the departed.  It seemed that Miranda had been a mentor to all of them in some capacity before retiring.  

After them came friends and neighbors, both those older folks who remembered her from her years of (literally) bringing light into their lives and her outskirts neighbors for whom she would - in her own words - “keep herself useful in retirement” by delivering baked goods and watching over young children like a surrogate great aunt.  

Then Lin and Huan took their turns to speak of her as they knew her in her final months.  It seems she’d been lucky enough to keep her mind sharp to the end and her body active enough that she was never truly bedridden until her final few days.  They said she’d claimed to be at peace with the end she knew was coming, if perhaps a little annoyed to see her strength she’d been so proud of wither, and perhaps a little disappointed not to see all the kids she’d played the part of nanny for grow to adults.

Then, at last, came the closing statements from Pat and the mediator overseeing the matter.  The same one I’d told about the death a few days ago actually.  Aolani, I think I finally caught her name as being.

Ceremony concluded, the mourners began filing out, back to the safety of their homes - or in the case of those from the outskirts, homes of family members or the inn - before the mist grew untraversable and the sun went down.  Once again, I lingered on as the last to leave, though with additional duties to attend to this time and the mists already being thick from the ceremony running late, not for so long as last time.

Much like last time I felt like a callous intruder to the whole thing, but I think I was a little more at peace with it this time around.  No connection to the deceased whom I’d never met, just doing my job scribbling away in my notebook as I stood behind and off to the side from the crowd with no emotion to distract from my duty.  Well, maybe I wasn’t that detached, but telling myself that I was made it easier to do what I needed to.  As did choosing not to stand among the mourners and near the front of everything, like I had last time.  I’d learned that being able to hear what was being said slightly better wasn’t worth the social unease of taking notes at a funeral next to someone who was actually sad.

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I let the mask drop once everyone had gone but me and the deceased and I indulged myself with a moment of introspection navel gazing while I finally got a good look at the shell this Miranda had left behind.  There’d been a difference in tone, certainly between this funeral and Bartolome’s.  I wonder how much of it was due to differences in them as people and how much was due to Miranda having a more public-facing job.  The hunter who rarely had need to interact with people vs the crystal collector who went into everyone’s homes at regular intervals to renew their light sources.  Is that a meaningful distinction to make though?  Those are jobs that would seem to attract different sorts of people.  And yet, of the two of them it was Bartolome who found love of a romantic sort and raised a family.  But it was Miranda who had people around her to the end.  A paradox?  I’m not sure, but he was sent to the Catacombs with an artifact that his sons fought over while she was sent off surrounded by crystal-light as a last gift from her former apprentices, and that just feels like I should be reading symbolism into it.

Will my own funeral be more like Miranda’s, with all those whose lives I’ve recorded as part of my work coming back to recite their own records of mine?  Or will it just be this same small handful of people I’ve let in to know me and bothered to get to know in return?  I don’t think I’d mind that.  Just have to not lose them or drive them away before then.  All assuming of course that I even get a funeral and don’t just disappear with a forever indeterminate fate like so many other outsiders before me.

As for the additional record keeping afterward with Aolani, I have no desire to repeat the minutiae of that a second time today and will consign it solely to the official archival records.  Suffice to say that I didn’t think the Village even had paperwork, much less that quantity.  Distribution of property without relatives or wills  is a complicated thing.

I did run into Vernon on my way out of the mediators’ building though.  I half suspect he was waiting around for me.  He asked me how I was holding up and I told him I was doing so fairly well, all things considered.  No episodes today.

He expressed confusion about that last part.  I realized he was the only one I hadn’t filled in on that.  I explained, although I may have downplayed the severity of how badly they shook me each time (was I overly obvious in that downplaying?) and added that I’m told they should stop after tonight’s… dream.

He offered to let me stay at his place for the night.  Said he knew mist nights get bad for me and I didn’t need to be alone for it.

I wanted to accept.  I really did.  But I didn’t want to wake him up in the middle of the night.  I knew he would insist that he would gladly deal with that to help a friend if I gave that explanation though, so instead I politely declined, saying that I’d be fine just sleeping in a familiar bed with a blanket that I’m pretty sure by now is an artifact.

It didn’t help that during my explanation about my episodes that I realized I hadn’t mentioned the one I had at the cathedral to anyone other than Maiko.  I hadn’t meant to not tell them, but it just sort of slipped my mind with the other things that had happened down there.  And now I’m not sure how to bring it up without bringing up the opened sarcophagus which I still haven’t figured out what to do about, and that had me feeling in the moment like I didn’t deserve his kindness.

Tonight’s going to be bad, if the last funeral was anything to go by, but there’s nothing for it.  I’ll be leaving one of the lights in my alcove partially uncovered and the door cracked open.  It’ll make it harder to get to sleep, but maybe it won’t be as horrifying when I wake up in darkness this time.

 

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