For a somber event, the funeral seemed awfully chatty. Younger family members and friends were smiling, hugging, and kissing. Older ones stood sturdy, somberly waving people to their bosoms with tissue-clenching hands. There were no sobs of anguish, only muted assurances of love strung together in the rhythms of Dominican Spanish: “Ay, mi amor… Ay, mi vida...”

There were many more strange faces than familiar ones. I had separated myself from my cousin Viviana to move into the viewing room. We were too happy to see each other and had scrambled to catch up on things, but there were other family members elbowing their way to talk with her -- Viviana was a quasi-celebrity in the Gomez-Reyes clan. Her mother kept in touch with relatives. I got quizzical looks at first, but when I opened my mouth and said hello in my television-anchor English, they figured out who I was: "La hija de Lupe!” And the hugs followed.

“A-nunn-si-ate j’or wor’s,” my mother would command with her Caribbean lilt. The vocabulary and pronunciation standard in our house was a product of my mother’s desire to “Americanize” us as much as possible. She used the nightly news as our curriculum and Peter Jennings as our instructor.

I kept glancing back to make sure my brother was close behind. His Spanish was better than mine and had I lost sight of him, I would have felt as if I’d been dropped into a foreign country, mute and with no map. I grasped his wrist and pulled him to take a seat with me. He didn’t sit down right away. Instead, he did what I found undoable and walked up to our grandmother’s open casket.
“Alex!” I hissed. Too late. He had placed his hands on the edge of the casket, holding on while he knelt. My love for Mama, our grandmother, was almost pious. She had been full of familial love for me, refreshingly forbearing during years of serious illness and family struggle. I couldn’t bear to see her inanimate, emaciated body. I needed so terribly to remember her as she always was: robust, beautiful, and smiling at me.

At some unsaid signal, the chattering faded. I was still processing the sight of my brother kneeling over the coffin, crying. He was 25 years old and it was the first time I had seen him shed tears in a decade.

My hands were fiddling with a wet tissue; I watched myself play with the frayed ends. A strong male voice, calling in Spanish for everyone to have a seat so we could begin, prompted me to raise my heavy head. Right away I became fixated on another image that would burn itself into my mind, evolving instantly into a flashbulb memory.

Standing at the head of Mama’s casket was a slight, bald, Chinese priest, and out of his mouth flowed the most sweetly faultless Spanish. A Chinese, Catholic priest, who would have looked more at home in a Buddhist monk’s saffron robe, was standing at my Dominican grandmother’s coffin, reading the scriptures and reciting blessings in the cadence of a native speaker.