The Day Tragedy Wore The Other Shoe

By Oscar Barajas, NewsTaco

Death was never a stranger in our household. He hung a hat and placed his keys just far away to make an entrance and leave a mark. As children, my sister and I had been to enough funerals to have a uniform designated for such sullen occasions. From a young age, I was not interested in adult conversations because they never talked about pirates, torrid love affairs or baseball. My parents and their friends primarily talked about who had died back in Mexico, who was dying, and who had the cancer. In fact, the only time they talked about baseball, was when they were describing the size of the tumors their acquaintances had been struck down with.

Then a funny thing happened, when it seemed that everyone decided to stop dying. As a family, we spent about five years without going to funerals. My parents were almost upset about it. It wasn’t that they were death merchants, but it gave them something to talk about. They were like that undertaker in that Paul McCartney song “Band on the Run.” I did not care for funerals, because it always meant an additional day of church. Just because we went to church on Saturday, it would not excuse us to miss on Sunday. I must have been nine when I decided that I would die as close to a Monday as possible so I would not have to screw up anybody’s weekend plans.

The next funeral I went to did not occur on a Saturday, but it was one of the heaviest ones I have ever attended. It was an ugly scene. I remember it was only a couple of weeks before my 18th birthday and I was sitting in second period in Ms. Giribaldi’s Italian class absorbing the atmosphere conducive to learning. My friend Ruben walked in tardy as he complained that his brother had decided not to give him a ride to school. He was only halfway through his rant when he received a summons by the office and when he came back, he was in tears. He did not tell any of us why. When he did return to school, it was to inform us that his brother Ernie had done something completely stupid.

Ernie was a decade older than Ruben, and Ruben worshipped the ground he walked on. They were close at a time when the rest of his sibling were either married or on their way there. Ernie had been in a relationship with a woman that ended poorly. She was a Spanish teacher at our James A. Garfield High School of Jaime Escalante fame. On that day, she was going to their house to pick up her possessions from Ernie. He had them all packed for her and waiting in the driveway. As she lifted the box filled with material memories, Ernie brandished a gun and shot her. Then he shot her again. Finally, he turned the gun on himself.

The funeral happened on a Tuesday. I did not know how to act. I had already outgrown my funeral clothes and my parents did not want me to attend because they considered it bad luck or maybe because they did not want to lend me money to buy some nice slacks from Sears. They instructed me not to go because they figured that the woman’s family was going to retaliate with a gang style execution drive-by shooting. I still went because I felt like I owed it to Ruben. At the burial site, his mother threw herself on the coffin. I cannot even begin to imagine what she felt.

In the end, it was a tense subject to discuss, because Ernie had left a very detailed suicide note inked in Pink Floyd lyrics. It seemed that he had been planning it for weeks. Ruben was never the same, and I doubt he ever will. He became a hermit, and I have not seen him in years. This was the last funeral I attended before I attended my parents and yet this one felt sadder only because you knew you were on the wrong side. I cannot imagine what the Spanish teacher’s funeral must have been like. She was plucked out at the peak of her life, and here we were commemorating “a mistake committed by a very confused young man.” I can only imagine what her eulogy sounded like.