Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Read Online Free Page A

this only because it took her breath away to simply move her fingers.
    While she reads, Katherine imagines her friend sitting in the wicker chair that faced the long backyard at her home. Annie would look up occasionally just to check the sky, just to see if it was still there curving above her, just to make certain that she could do just that—look. She would be thinking of Katherine and would maybe laugh out loud as she imagined Katherine, at this very moment, drinking her wine and filled with intense waves of wondering. Yes, Annie would definitely laugh.
    “Shit,” Katherine said out loud. “You
so
knew who I was.”
    The instructions, however, were filled with nothing laughable except the seemingly sheer impossibility of the desires placed after her name—
“Katherine . . .”
The instructions to the untrained eye might seem as hilarious as anything so difficult to accomplish that the only, the real, the natural response—must be to laugh.
    Katherine, Laura, Rebecca, Jill and Marie——
    I sure as hell would never have wanted a traditional funeral. You can all figure out how to get along without me. You can figure out that this makes sense and that at this time in your lives—Katherine, your mother; Laura, your daughter; Rebecca—everyone, so much loss and now me too; Jill, whatever loss you hold against your breastbone: all those students you no longer have to love and to help sustain your energy and direction; and Marie, all those lingering souls—all that loss needs to be colored in and then held to the light and you need to get rid of me, celebrate me, allow me this one last wish and here it is:
    I want a traveling funeral.
    That’s my wish.
    I’ve spent weeks and weeks thinking about this, planning it, making the arrangements, and it has given me the great and extraordinary opportunity to take a remarkable journey back during the planning so that I can now move forward and so that you—and the women I have loved most—can honor me, grieve me and also prepare yourselves for what is coming down the road in your own lives. You are also allowed to have some fun. You all work too damn hard.
    Do not—even one of you—say that you cannot attend my traveling funeral, because you are the procession. Do not one of you make an excuse why you cannot share this time with the women whose names are with yours on this list and do not think that this will be entirely painful. It will be fun. You will share stories and remember me and in that remembering you will also remember a part of you that may have become buried under all the damn layers of life that accumulate day after day until they have lined up like a brick wall to prevent us from seeing—really seeing.
    You may not always get along, especially if Katherine is always in charge (Katherine—I’m kidding—remember what they said about you in high school?) and it may not be easy for you to arrange your schedules and families and the timetable in your own heads, which were not prepared for something like the traveling funeral of your friend Annie. But I am asking each of you to try. Please try and do this.
    The tiny little details of this trip are not set in stone—however, the tickets, the reservations, the days you will travel are unchangeable because some of you will think of a way to back out, will make excuses, will think of something to detain you. There is no stopping Annie Freeman’s traveling funeral—it may even end up to be fabulous.
    Katherine is the leader because she was the first. She saved my life in many ways and allowed me to see the true value of female friendship in a way that set the tone for all of you—for the way each of you entered my life and hollowed out your own place there and then stayed no matter where the road took all of us.
    I have spoken to each one of you during these last months of mine and have tried very hard over the years to let you know how much I love you and how I have treasured your place in my life. I choose