Funeral in Pittsburgh: Part One

It was colder in Atlanta on both ends of the trip. Pittsburgh didn’t exactly welcome us to town with cold enough temperatures and plenty of snow when we arrived. Being in Pittsburgh triggered memories but most of them were of visiting Pittsburgh. I lived in Pittsburgh for the first six years of my life. It’s my hometown but I have no real connection to it.

A thread was closing this past weekend. My grandmother died last Saturday, two days and forty years after her first husband, and finally she would claim her patch of ground next to him. Her last home was in Leechburg, a suburb of Pittsburgh that time forgot. I visited her house at the top of one of the super steep hills that are the trademark of the Steel City. Coming back at least 20 years after my last visit, it hadn’t changed at all.

The wake was Friday. There were a surprising number of people there, because as my dad mentioned, Grandma Alice was 97 and outlived most of her friends. My other grandmother, who is a youthful 81, mentioned that the body in the casket didn’t look like the woman she remembered. I agreed. The body wasn’t there for her. It was there for us. It was a reasonable facsimile so we could remember her as a living soul.
My parents thoughtfully provided a picture book. There were pictures all the way back to the turn of the 20th century. I saw multiple pictures of my grandfather for the first time, or the first time that I could remember. He was the only overweight WW2 serviceman that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, I didn’t think that anyone was more than a buck 40 who wore the uniform.

We had some sandwiches upstairs and my nephews stayed up there. That’s where my dad’s cookies were, and every time their mom turned her head they ate another two. Eventually the southern boys went outside and had a snowball fight. They threw snowballs at each other and passersby. After a couple of hours we all left and went back to Monroeville.

A family gathering is not such without drinking. We got together in my cousins’ room and opened some wine, beer, and Makers Mark. I knew my brother was in trouble when he drank it straight. I should have known he was in trouble when I saw the sweater with the skull on it.

Once the giant bottle of wine was gone, I was done. I had been up for 18 hours which was plenty. We went to sleep, knowing that Saturday was the main event. It would be the funeral.