A funeral in Chatham County

BLOOMINGDALE, GA. — The church is a black box. Windowless, metal and brick, somehow commercially grand and utilitarian all at once.

It is a performance venue, a proscenium stage with a drum kit on a riser and stands for guitars and an electric bass. It is not a place where light strains through stained glass. No acrid altar incense wafts. There are no stations of the cross, no heavy wood pews.

This is not the sort of church I know, but Pastor Sam Martin (no relation) seems kind and intelligent. Without my sister Jackie, he says, there would be no Christmas Eve service at Gateway Church (my mother says it’s non-denominational but its doctrine derives from Methodist). She and my brother-in-law insisted there be a service, but David the head pastor said no, on Christmas Eve families gather together. Some open presents. It is not church night, he said.

Jackie persisted. There are people with nowhere to go on Christmas Eve, she said. They need community, fellowship. Maybe she was thinking about the midnight masses she attended as a child. She wore David the head pastor down.

Fine, he said, you can hold your Christmas Eve service. But I won’t be there. I’ll be home with my family. Waitin’ up for Santy Claus. No one will come, you’ll see.

So Jackie and Porter held a Christmas Eve service themselves. People came. Lots of people. Jackie probably told them they had to.

The Christmas Eve service has become a tradition at Gateway Church. Now there are two of them. Reservations are recommended. It is one of its biggest deals.

Pastor Sam is giving a eulogy for my sister. The main point seems to be that she was bossy.

She was. She decreed that all of us who showed up at her memorial service should come in jeans and sweatshirts, preferably the merch of SEC football teams. A lot of them have. My mother wears an LSU T-shirt underneath a turquoise jacket. My niece and grand-niece are similarly attired. There is some Georgia gear. A couple of Alabama partisans.

My sister was an LSU fan, which strikes me as odd because she didn’t go to LSU, I did. She went to Louisiana Tech. Her husband Porter, who also went to Louisiana Tech, supports Alabama and the Dallas Cowboys. They were always kind of frontrunners—I don’t think Jackie was an LSU fan back in the Cholly Mac days.

My sister was bossy, but she didn’t boss me.

My concession is that instead of a suit and tie, I wore a sport coat over a light denim shirt and cotton trousers. No one sees I am wearing a vintage LSU T-shirt, an earned one, from my college days, not one downloaded off fanatics.com, beneath that shirt. Maybe Jackie knows; I can’t presume to guess.

There are screens upon which photos are being projected. Many are from the ’80s, and therefore inherently funny. Some are from the last four years and heartbreaking.

A woman sings a hymn. She is a very good vocalist, but a little too on top of the note for my taste. We got here early—my family always gets places early or late—and I heard her rehearsing. She was a lot freer and jazzier, hanging slightly behind the beat. But when the lights go on, you do things by the book, lest someone accuse you of thinking yourself Mahalia or Aretha. Someone tells me she was “one of Jackie’s teachers” and I make a note to seek her out

after the service, but she’s gone before I can get to her.

I don’t know what I would have said besides “thank you.”

Back at my mother’s house there is a reception, too much food and faces swimming up at me. My 91-year-old Aunt Edith sees dead people, her daughter Debbie haunts the halls of Edith’s assisted living facility and sits quietly with her in the evenings. Edith has a trick where she holds her coat out in front of her before putting it on by flicking it over her head and shoving both arms through in one motion.

It is impressive, but my cousin Greg says sometimes when she does it she knocks her wig off.

I have not seen Greg for maybe 50 years, but I recognize him. He is my age, a little bigger than me. He set rushing records at Georgia Southern; I remember looking up his stats in the newspaper. He had tryouts with the Washington football team and the Miami Dolphins. It was a great experience, he says, but he was not good enough to make those teams.

I tell him I know the feeling. We talk for a little while; he’s overseeing a construction project in Little Rock and he gets here once or twice a year. I give him the pertinent information; we will probably get together.

My other brother-in-law Carl is a boat captain and alligator hunter. When he was a kid he walked in his sleep, so when he went out overnight on his father’s shrimp trawler, at bedtime the old man would tie a string around his big toe, with the other end tied around Carl’s toe. So Carl never wandered off the boat and into the dark waters.

After a while, after most of the guests have left, I decide to go for a walk. Nicole, the 27-year-old daughter of my other sister Mechele, suspects I am going out to scout the nearby liquor stores. She’s not wrong. But Porter has some Jim Beam and Crown Royal. There is a jammy red wine and some white zinfandel in the refrigerator.

Later my mother bartends. Do I want a drink? Sure. So she splashes some Michter’s Sour Mash into a red plastic cup of Sprite. Nicole laughs and heroically accepts the drink as I fix my own and walk into the living room to listen to stories. I need material. Mechele says I only change the names when it’s bad.

There is a darker way to tell most stories. My sister had, by some measures, a turbulent life. Eulogies are supposed to be kind, and there’s no reason other than performative self-indulgence for them not to be.

Families are strange organisms, and mine is no stranger than most. We manage to be gentle to one another, to help and accept help, and as best we can, tie strings around one another’s toes. The tug goes both ways.

Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.

There will be two Christmas Eve services at Gateway Church this evening. I understand they’re both sold out.