I see the funeral in my mind, now as something that took place mostly inside a small church with very few people. I know it cannot be true since I remember the feeling of being smothered by too many questions from too many faces without names.

They didn't know me or him. It was his funeral and his life and they were never a part of it, even when he was alive.

His father was there, yes, the one that had fallen off the edge of the earth when he was 16. The one that he despised. His twin always maintained the hope that maybe someday he'd come back and they'd all be some sort of twisted family again, but he knew better than to have sappy little hopeless thoughts like that. What his father had done to that family was irrevocable.

His oldest brother sat like a stone in the back of the church. He was never close to his mother in the first place and the grief had shocked him so much that he could bare to sit next to his last living brother, the carbon copy of the one he had lost. He sat there like a stone, a silent weeping stone, drowning without a hope in a pool of grief.

And he sat in the back, behind weeping teenagers and bawling punks, but in my memory there were only rows and rows of empty pews that separated him from his family in the front.

And his twin, his best friend, his other half, sat in hysterics in the front pew, not believing a single thing that any pastor or speaker spewed forth about his twin. He cried out loud, loosing grip of his tough guy image that he always had before. He was a little boy, standing in a grown man's body dealing with the death of his best friend, brother, twin.

Brackish tears even made their way down my cheeks. I never showed emotion of any kind in public, but silent tears made paths down my skin and I couldn't help myself. I couldn't feel anything beside pain. And he was gone, gone forever. He wasn't coming back. He was gone, gone forever.

I never understood the idea of a funeral. Sitting around and crying over a body. A body! Not even a person anymore. There was nothing inside a corpse that seemed human. His spirit was gone. I don't know where he might be, but he wasn't in that coffin and he wasn't floating on some kind of twisted cloud in God's arms or any of the bullshit.

Anyway, sitting in that sticky hot church, I couldn't help but think about how mad he'd be to see his brother, his tough guy brother, crying over him. He always was kept together by the tough guy when their dad left. While he was off acting emo, crying his eyes out and getting depressed, his brother stood tall and strong, and it kept it together when every thing else was slowly crumbling.

I heard the crying, the moaning, the wailing, of angst riddled teenagers. I don't remember seeing them, but their sounds are clear in my mind. The empty pews and the moaning teenagers that I don't remember seeing.

The oldest brother sat in the back and silently cried. I wonder if he was crying because he missed out on a big chuck of his dead brother's life when he ran away after their dad left.

Tough tattooed men let their true emotions show and they let their tears fall down their cheeks. It was disturbing to see them cry and to know that he wasn't coming back.

The pastor talked about how life was sacred and how life was great and how everything was in God's plan. What was so wrong with the plan he had before he died? What was so wrong with it? God threw it out the window and he died. On the spot. No warning. No cry. No pain, only a dull headache that grew with intensity over days until that morning backstage at sound check. He just fell, right there, and died.

I could cry a thousand tears and miss him with all my heart, but he's not coming back. There's no coming back when you're gone. You can't bring someone back to life, no matter how hard to try.

I felt a headache coming on and a chill ran down my spin. I wondered if I was dying like he was. He had a million headaches and never died. His last headache was an aneurysm. It burst. He died. Not many people live through a burst aneurysm. Not many people who live can live by themselves. He died. No chance. He died, on the spot, dead on arrival.

A tear fell down my cheek and dropped into a cut on my finger I had gotten the morning he died and stung me a bit. We were at sound check. I was playing and a blister burst. I cussed a bit, he laughed a bit. He sat down on the drum riser. Stood up. Fell down. Died.

His death was a brackish tear in my heart, and it stung.