The Small Beauty of Funeral Sex

For reasons I do not fully understand, every funeral home has a little basket of potpourri in the bathroom, placed there like a time warp straight to the 1980s. You know what I mean. The kind that looks like little pieces of bark, dyed in lurid colors and saturated in artificial scent, the kind that blasts you with the stench of cinnamon sticks and rotting honeysuckle vine left in a car on a hot day, making you question how badly you need to pee. Sometimes, to add insult to injury, there is a single drooping fake lily, stem gilded in dust, in a knobby white vase.

Milk glass, they call it.

It is the potpourri that spills to the floor when I push her back against the counter, one hand on her hip, rooting her to me. Her head is tilted back and her eyes are dilated, bright with anticipation as the petal shreds crackle underfoot, releasing bursts of Spring-Fresh Scent. I rescue the teetering vase before it falls too, and when she starts to laugh, I silence her with a hand against her lips, lightly, my thumb rolling over the salt on her cheeks. Her heaving breaths speak of hovering on the edge of emotions too great to be contained, not about me or the vase, and she struggles to find her ground.

“Do you want to . . . ”

Her voice is rough with tears and talking and I let her lead me out of the bathroom, weaving through the crowd of people who have gathered in the hall, lingering, unwilling to let go, to face the reality of leaving the body behind while the rest of us go on living. Her hand is hot in mine, and I will follow her anywhere.

There is a thing that happens with those adjacent to death that many people seem to be afraid to speak of, perhaps because it feels startling and shameful when it happens to them for the first time. Perhaps because no one speaks of it, they assume they are alone in this, perverse, broken. But those of us in the know are well aware that funerals—memorials, celebrations of life, transition ceremonies, Passages (always with a capital P)—are absolutely the best places for hooking up. Superior to weddings, better than hot rooftop parties in summer, certainly more than a long night at the end of the bar at a conference. (Remember when we did all those things? The very thought makes the skin sing.) Funeral horniness is real, even if no one will tell you, at least when it comes to white people funerals, yes, even the ritzy ones, and yes, even the devoutly religious ones. Someone, somewhere in the cathedral has a hardon during a funeral mass, I guarantee you, and bully for them, I say.

There is something about sex that feels like an unequivocal “fuck you” to death, taking something back from that which has taken something from you, making eros out of Thanatos and keeping the grim reaper at bay. As someone who clocks a lot of funeral hours thanks to the disability community’s excellence in death (grand prize at the fair thirty years running), what strikes me about funeral horniness is its immense equalizing power. It strikes across race, class, gender, faith, sexuality, across beliefs about death and dying, death culture; the twenty-three-year-old queer cousin with the eyebrow ring and rainbow hair just as much as the sixty-year-old older brother in the Savile Row suit. It happens at the week-long party in the desert months after the funeral, in the corridor of the kitchen at Portuguese Hall (you know the one) during the gathering, years later, when you wake gasping, haunted by the smell of lavender soap. Whether it’s your mother or your lover or someone else, if it gets you, it gets you, and you should not feel in the least guilty about it.

There are, assuredly, some sex and death psychological reasons for it. Confronted with your own mortality, you seek refuge in something primal and alive. Some people eat their way through funeral-baked meats and others fuck and others both, though likely not at the same time. Some people might want to make it about fertility, but that’s garbage; it’s about a visceral, vital contact with another human being, a sense of being in them and of them and part of them, and that doesn’t have to be about the possibility of making more of you to die and start the cycle all over again.

It is a peculiarly specific kind of fucking that makes it unique, particularly when everyone involved was close to the deceased, and is leaving some part of them behind in the grave or at the crematorium, slipping into the deeps or launching into the skies. You can search for that part of you forever and you’ll never find it, but for a moment with someone else who has that same feeling of intense loss, you can pretend it isn’t gone forever.

Maybe it’s a furtive fumbling in the funeral home bathroom, biting your lip on the train home with your partner as you feel something crackling between you, or following someone home from the cemetery, swearing when you can’t find parking without a meter and you don’t have any quarters, weighing whether you’re willing to run the risk of a parking ticket for a trip up a familiar set of stairs that feels oddly off-kilter, now that someone is gone. Maybe it’s the small gathering that drifts back to your house, wanting more of each other, not yet willing to say farewell, where people slowly peel off until you are left sitting on the couch together with someone. Maybe it is someone you have orbited for years without knowing, maybe it is an old friend, maybe a stranger who got swept up in the migration. There is something there between you, coiled, patient. You will think that you really should vacuum up all the sand before it gets everywhere, and you will get up, wander into the kitchen, forget whatever it was you meant to do, and they will help you forget everything else.

It’s about a visceral, vital contact with another human being, a sense of being in them and of them and part of them.

There is a peculiar sense of concentration that forces the world to fall away, something ritualistic; it is perhaps simply closure, an endpoint to the intense emotion that drives and drives and drives with death, until the official ceremonies are done but you are still left gasping, teetering on a precipice of Nothing Else To Do, food in Tupperware and errant scarves reunited with owners, and the thought of sitting alone in silence with every nerve ending alive is unbearable.

Not everyone gets it, of course, because everybody is different. Every body is different. And bodies come wrapped in their own social and cultural expectations that push them to act, or not, on their feelings. Some people go along with their lives as they are, and others become repulsed by the very idea of sex; sometimes grief comes with trauma that wraps itself around sexuality, perhaps especially for those who lose a partner. “Sexual bereavement,” they call it, a loss of a lengthy companionship complicated by a bewildering array of emotions, including a unique sense of loss.

I couldn’t tell you when I first experienced that itching, pulling, longing sensation that later I identified as funeral horniness, but I do remember going to the funeral of a family friend in high school, generations milling in closeness at the house later, tables groaning with food as the sound of people playing musical instruments somewhere floated in. Someone lit a fire in the backyard, and it threw off sparks that arced into the growing darkness. The house smelled like old books and gun oil and I felt like I was crawling out of my skin, unable to settle anywhere, evading well-meaning hugs and jowly faces arranged in expressions of sympathy, not understanding what this sensation was. I filched a beer from the fridge and sat out in the garden, away from the noise, by the fishpond, and tried to remember the last time I had sat there with our old friend, her gnarled fingers opening to release the cheap cat food she fed the fish. I wondered when they’d last been fed, and then someone sat down next to me and I decided it didn’t matter very much anymore.

The funeral is for the living, a crowd of people who have this thing—a love for someone who was once alive and now is not—in common. The whole thing is profoundly unjust: We are supposed to live forever, or at least die in thrilling 1940s murder mystery ways, slumped over our desks in locked rooms, not wheeled out of nursing homes or killed in pointless car accidents. The funeral is their moment to gather the parts of their loved one’s life into a whole, one that is often messy and dramatic, saturated with tears and littered in tissues. It is likely the last time this specific group of people will ever get together, and this awareness sparks something troubled in us as we light candles or dig the grave or sit in awkward rows in an antiseptic funeral home while people bumble up and down from a lectern and insipid music plays overhead. It is not just the death of the deceased that has happened to us in this space, but the severing of our connections to one another. Some of these people, we know, we will never see again.

A friend writes of watching her mother buried over livestream, the camera slightly askew as the cemetery workers lower the casket. They never got to see the body, and it took days for the funeral home to wrest her from the custody of one of those long, chilly trailers that had popped up like mushrooms across New York City. There are painful pauses and silences. No one knows how to do this, to have a funeral that is not a funeral, because a funeral is fleshy parts crammed together and rustling skirts and awkward movements, dodging unwanted interactions and eating peculiar, earthy things at the afterparty—sorry, the gathering. Small, family only. But these are the funerals we have now; clients banned from funeral homes, barred access to cemeteries and crematoria, bodies whisked away into the darkness, never to be seen again, arrangements made over the phone or through masks on the sidewalk, standing six feet apart, passersby averting their gazes from something that should be taking place in a nice quiet room somewhere away, with tasteful music and a box of tissues and an innocuous flower arrangement.

We do not get to prepare our dead anymore. We do not get to dig graves or watch as the cremation container proceeds into the retort. For those who value viewings, a stilted version, corpse propped up in the middle of a video feed, is all that is available. Even drive-by funerals have been nixed as we all hide at home from a virus that has killed over 100,000 people in the United States alone, a tremendous number of funerals that proceed alongside the 7,700 or so other people who die in this country each day. Funeral rituals and traditions are being shredded. At times there is a strange, wondrous sense of incompletion, that perhaps someone is missing, not truly dead, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Like children denied access to the funeral because it might scare us, we don’t understand: How can she not be coming back anymore?

But that peculiar, tingling feeling, like someone running their fingers lightly across your arm, making the hairs stand up as your back arches—that feeling does not go away. It whispers at the edges of your consciousness when you get the phone call, tugs insistently as you ask about “arrangements” and claws at you in the night as you toss and turn in bed. When you sleep, you will dream of the dead, but when you wake, you will not remember what they said, only stand at the window watching the unseasonal rain, wondering where they are now. When the funeral horniness takes you, you are alone with it, sheltering, at home, at a moment when it is physical intimacy that kills.

But death, an ending, demands a beginning; sex, a beginning, demands an ending.

You will always risk the parking ticket.

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