When my mom dressed my brother and me in our Easter outfits and told us we were going to the funeral of Bill the Clown, we didn’t know how to react. We could see she was sad and supposed that we should be, too. But the prospect of a clown funeral was just too tantalizing.

In light of the uncertainty our mother’s behavior casts on my own genetically inherited mental capacities, I prefer to believe it was the grief, and not some hard-wired intellectual deficiency, that made our mom refer to the deceased solely by his clown name. If she had been in her right mind, she would have recalled how zealously she had guarded the flamboyant performer’s secret identity and how clueless we were to the possibility that Bill the Clown might have some connection to the man we knew as “Uncle Bill”—our grandmother’s retired and comparatively mild-mannered neighbor. Never mind that the only place we ever saw Bill the Clown was in Uncle Bill’s home or that Uncle Bill always disappeared just before Bill the Clown showed up. Mom had behaved as if clowns were dignitaries from an otherworldly realm, so, as far as we were concerned, there was no reason to believe that Bill the Clown and Uncle Bill were members of the same species, let alone the same person. The two looked nothing alike.

Needless to say, the funeral was disappointing. Teary faces surrounded my brother and me as we made our way to the open casket. I tried desperately to ignore these grim portents and hoped against all hope that we still might be in for a faceful of boutonniere water or an endless stream of baggy-pants clowns all pouring out of the same tiny coffin. But the only content of that casket was our honorary uncle, looking older and more tired than ever before.
This was our first exposure to a dead body, but it would not be our last. We grew up in New Port Richey, Florida’s consummate retirement town, so there was never any shortage of funerals to attend. Like many young people, we lacked proper respect for death, but not because it wasn’t real to us. On the contrary, it was mundane.
Once, in junior high, some friends and I found a body in the park. We planned to poke it with a stick to find out if it was dead or alive, but fear overcame us. Maybe kids in other towns would have chickened out because they couldn’t handle the prospect of their first terrifying gaze into the face of death. But we had a much greater fear. We were afraid the guy might still be alive. A corpse was something New Port Richey kids could deal with, but disturbing the slumber of an angry drunk still seemed pretty dangerous. In the end, we got one of our moms to do the poking for us and were relieved to find that, even though the drunk was alive, he was far too wasted to retaliate.
A few years later, when I was fourteen, my grandfather died, and I found myself still unable to respond to death with an appropriate sense of gravity. Grandma had sent a friend to pull us out of church so that we could all be with the body before it got carted off to the morgue. We sobbed hysterically for a few minutes, but as soon as the paramedics took the body, we had no idea what to do. My brother, a big fan of all-you-can-eat dining establishments, proposed that the best way to honor Grandpa would be to follow through with his plan to have lunch at Fanny’s Buffet, where—he reminded us— “Sundays are ‘Roast Beef Madness.’” The idea got nixed, but our dad agreed that sticking with a previously-made plan was the best way to go and, in accordance with his own custom, broke out the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.
But as strange as those reactions were, mine was even stranger. That evening, just after the sun went down, I found myself in front of the home of Alicia Holmes. She was a good friend of my sister, Kim, and was famous for her precocious libido. I had always pretended to be repulsed by Alicia’s desperate quest for male attention but secretly prayed for more of her exhibitionist offerings. She used to crawl into my bed and lavish me with kisses, but I always pretended to sleep right through them so that I could later deny any complicity. I wanted desperately to feel better than someone and believed that, as long as I never openly consented to Alicia’s advances, I could claim moral superiority over this sex-crazed weirdo.
But all that changed the day my grandfather died. My brother and my father may have wanted to stick with previously-made plans, but I wanted a change. I wanted to become a man, and Alicia seemed like the most likely accomplice. I paced back and forth in front of her house, rehearsing the lines I would use to evoke a sympathetic response. “I just thought you might want to know that Kim’s grandfather died today,” I’d say, feigning altruism. “Oh, my God!” she’d gasp, stepping out onto the porch with me. “She’s pretty shook up,” I’d lie. “Might need a friend to help her get through it.”
It was the smarmiest plan I’ve ever concocted, but, fortunately, it never came to fruition because I wasn’t brave enough to knock on the Holmes’ door after dark. The fact is I wasn’t ready for manhood. Not only was I incapable of the kind of intimacy I had hoped to achieve with Alicia, I had no idea why I had hoped to achieve it on that particular night, of all nights. Why had my grandfather’s passing awakened such intense carnal ambition? What was the connection?
The answer to that mystery came nearly five years later and coincided with my first real understanding of how formidable death actually is. I was a freshman at the University of South Florida, still living with my parents in New Port Richey but feeling incredibly cosmopolitan about attending classes in Tampa. On this particular night, my friend Alan, my brother Jim, and I were driving home from the Student Union after a screening of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.” Our stars were rising as we sped past the farmlands of State Road 54, recounting all those sex jokes and chuckling as if we knew what we were talking about. We soared above the rabble of our small town past, feeling just as urbane as Woody Allen—but twenty-five years younger. As far as we knew, we were immortal.
Then, suddenly we saw it. A single headlight shining from a ditch. A motorcyclist had miscalculated a hairpin turn and was writhing on the shoulder. I screeched to a halt and ran to see if I could help, all the while thinking Don’t stop! Don’t help! Pretend you didn’t see I! I felt the same way I had felt that day in the park. Terrified that this man was still alive and selfishly preferring he were dead.
By the time I reached him, his writhing had diminished. His body lay front down but his face looked toward the sky. His neck had twisted, and he was clearly on his way out. Suddenly, inexplicably, I wanted him to live. He was young, only a few years older than we were, and the randomness of his fate struck me as an unfathomably cold incongruity. Every eulogy I had ever heard contained some sort of reassurance that the deceased had “lived a full life,” but this man’s passing could not be so easily dismissed. I sped to the nearest pay phone and called for help, but by the time I returned, it was too late. The guy was gone, and a crowd of bucolic locals had gathered, beers in hand, to watch the show.
Alan, Jim, and I drove back to New Port Richey and, echoing reactions to my grandfather’s death, decided to stick with a previously-made plan. We spent the entire weekend together, which is what we always did. But it was different this time. We barely spoke and never laughed. We had, at long lost, grown beyond our retirement-town upbringing and entered a weird new world where death is for people of all ages. I passed Alicia’s house without the slightest simmering of lust and, for the first time, understood why my grandfather’s death had driven me to her doorstop like a dog in heat nearly five years before. I had always believed that death was for the elderly, but Grandpa’s passing had hit a little too close to home. So, to assure myself that I was fine, I turned my mind toward sex, because sex is for the young.
The weekend gave way to a new workweek, normal speech resumed, and we all settled into our new adult lives with a strange mixture of sadness and a sense of just how precious life really is. Three weeks later, I lost my virginity and, again, found myself speechless. I didn’t feel as big as I thought I would, but I didn’t mind the smallness because with it came a sense of being part of something much bigger than myself. I fell asleep on a rusting playset in my parents’ back yard, staring at the stars and wondering just how overrated immortality really is. Maybe the highest goal isn’t living forever, after all. Maybe it’s living fully while you’re here. Maybe it’s being part of it all.
The next day, I returned home from work to find my mother in full clown regalia.
“What’re you doing?” I asked, a bit freaked out.
“I’m a clown!” she proclaimed with unbridled pride.
“Why?” I asked, incredulously.
“Because clowns fill children’s hearts with joy,” she said, defensively. “And that’s something.”
In previous years, I would have made fun of her wish, but now I found it strangely admirable.
“You’re rights,” I said, kissing her grease-painted face. “That is something.”