the funeral memory, V.R.5

Two catalogued facts about the burial, and together they are pure Gertrude. The Moms had Himself "interred in her family's traditional plot in L'Islet Province" — not his own family's ground (his will specified only "not anywhere near his own dad's plot"), so the dead king lies among the queen's Québecois dead, absorbed into her lineage. And at the graveside, when a circling gull scores a direct hit on C.T.'s blue blazer and a blue-bodied fly flies into his shocked open mouth, "several persons laughed," and "The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone." The mourning-that-isn't: the widow laughing hardest at her husband's funeral while the successor-uncle takes the bird-droppings, the whole Hamlet complaint about insufficient grief compressed into a gull, a fly, and the Moms's laughter over the fresh grave.