I was carrying a coffin today and it makes you think. The people you carry, carry you in the end. My Nanda used to carry me and my cousins, now we stand over her body, the children she held. Carrying her out of this world as she carried us in. We're born together and we die together. We're born on a wire and die by wire, life is an AC connection that flickers but never dims.

I think of this as I stand in front of the electrical box that activates the cremation machine. In Sri Lankan tradition I have to do this, not my cousins. A son cannot ‘kill’ their parent, this is a massive pin demerit, leading straight to Buddhist hell. So the task falls on the nephew, which in this case is me. So I walk away from the mourners, around the furnace, to the electrical box at the end of all things.

Holding my hand is one of the weird funeral attendants, literally holding my hand and putting it on the ignition button. He told me to look away, thus taking the karmic hit himself. Like the ferryman of the dead, he then demands all my cash which I—deeply suggestible at this point—give. I found out he hit up my cousin also, honestly props to him. Then it's done, as much as anything gets done.

I watch the smoke coming out of the chimney and look down at the caged birds and gentle dogs around the cemetery. I know how the caged bird sings, it's very loud and annoying. I look in the dogs eyes and see my Nanda's kindness, which she inherited from my Achchi, which has been handed down to me, extremely lossily. It's like we went from records to CDs to highly compressed MP3s.

My cousin and I look at each other and ask how many people would come to our funeral? Nanda was a teacher, she touched hundreds of lives and changed dozens forever. We're far richer than Nanda ever was, but much poorer in spirit. We can pay the ferryman on this side, but we have no great treasure waiting for us in heaven. Honestly, we deserve to be held up at the cremation station.

But now it's just us. The kids sneaking cutlets and doing shots of coconut wine with Achchi at family functions. Now we have to organize them. Now look at us, circulating extremely sugary coffee and holding the threads of a dozen families together, barely. Can't hold them. Not really trying. I can see the old family slowly disappearing into death, diaspora, and disinterest. We've got our own families now. New families begin I guess. The old guard is dying.

Whenever my kids are fighting I tell them family is like a tree, and hold up my hands, one hand down as roots, the other up as branches. At the beginning there's a lot of roots, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Then there's lots of branches, kids. Eventually the roots start to die, and the branches start flowering, fruiting, and dropping off seeds, the germs of new families. I tell the kids they need to be strong roots for the next generation, that they need to stick together and stop fighting. The kids roll their eyes at me and keep fighting.

I see my son handing out hymn books, some day he'll be handing out him-in-a-box (him is the past tense of me). My boy is pretty useless now, but someday that'll be me. I got to walk him to the bathroom, and someday I'll need a walking. The children you care for, care for you. That's the deal. There's a gross symmetry to it.

I was in a street pharmacy, which is extremely narrow, and I was surrounded by adult diapers. I thought. ‘Shit's getting real in the field’. Shakesperera said the first and penultimate acts of life were the same; toddlers of differing cuteness, mewling and puking. It's not cute when you get incontinent as an adult, but shit happens, as they say. Why on earth would anyone deal with your shit? Because they dealt with your shit. That's the deal. The human being is not an individual. It's a relationship. And life is not a line, it's an endless loop. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes states, the AC current of life.

When everything's over I walk back through my ancestral ‘village’ of Galkissa, which has become an urban mess, and which I have no reason to visit now. My grandmother carried me down these streets, my aunt held my hand, but now they're gone. I physically held them and then let them go. I guess that's what funerals are for. Funerals are for the living. I can feel my place in the family tree physically shifting and I don't like it. I feel like a pigeon perched on the shoulder of giants. They don't make ‘em like Lilani Evelyn anymore. From a Bubba to a Nanda, rest in peace. You were a good person.