When was the last time your chin quivered and you bit your lip to stop it from shaking? The tears streamed down your face, then down your neck? And you sat with your hands clasped on your lap, feet neatly together, head down? And you listened to the prayers that everyone else knew the words to, but you don't because your parents didn't believe in religion?

It was 'really nice' though. It was nothing like my grandma's open-casket ordeal back in '98. Let me paint you a picture of that funeral. Small town BC, Doukhobor community church. Old people. Old people speaking Russian. We enter, as the 'party' of family, and we sit up front, next to the open casket. The mortician made grandma up with her wig; she looked so much more beautiful with her real hair, thin as it was, it was her. So I'm sitting there, awkward 17, grandma's blue-ish face on one side, and 50-odd large cabbage-smelling relatives on the other. They chanted traditional hymns. At the end, we stood in a circle, linked arms, and they recited the Lord's Prayer in Russian. In slow motion then, and even still now in my mind, I threw a handful of dirt on top of the wooden casket. The dark crumbles of earth landed and bounced off of the white flowers that decorated the casket. We drove home that night on the Crowsnest highway. We stopped at the Tast-E-Freeze just as if we'd been up visiting the farm.