Chelsie Paige

(I'm having a very hard time getting through this... so here it is unfinished)

I want to wrap him in my arms and never let him go, keep him safe, protect him from what is about to come.
But he doesn’t like being touched.
The church is huge and looks empty. There are not enough people for it to feel full, and I’m angry. There should be more people here, this is important.
I did not know Chelsie as well as I should have. The school district moved her up a year so that my brother wouldn’t be the only severely disabled child in the program. Chelsie had been born normal, but as a child developed a brain tumor. She had beat that one. And the second one. It was the third that brought us here.
I had only been to two funerals before this one, both family members who I was not close to. Technically, I was not close to Chelsie either. She was my little brother’s friend. His best and only friend. She had been moved up a grade so that the two special ed kids in the Brookline district would be together, and it worked fantastically. Chelsie liked me, although she only knew me as “Ross’ sister” and I of course liked her, it was impossible not to. I had pictures that she had drawn up on my wall, and a photograph of her with a big white bear in an Elmira t-shirt that I had sent her right after they found out her tumor was malignant. Her mom sent me a picture of her with the bear, and a certified Chelsie drawing, which still hangs on what I affectionately call my “wall of retarded art,” a segment of my dorm room dedicated to pictures by Ross and Chelsie.
We have all known that this is coming. I have been back in the country for three weeks now at the most, and I am thankful it happened after I came back. I dreaded call home, afraid that I would miss the moment when my little brother might need me the most. I am wearing shoes that I bought over in Russia, and I fixate on this point, that I have a chance to wear new heels, as a distraction from everything going on around me.
The church is huge, and it strikes me that this will be the first time I actually attend any kind of service in a Catholic church. I have always viewed them as relics, museums, places held in great reverence and observed for their history. In any other situation, this would excite me in some way, but today it simply makes me apprehensive. My mom and I aren’t sure how Ross will behave, we don’t even know how much of the situation he understands. His grasp of death is something we have no gauge on. When our dog of fifteen years died he showed no emotion, not even confusion as to where the dog was. Chelsie has been out of school for several months, will he understand that this means she’s not coming back? Does he understand gone?
We have taken our seats in the hard wooden pews, and the service starts. The priest begins with the story of Lazarus rising from the dead. I get it symbolically, through Jesus Chelsie will be reborn in Heaven, but can’t help but think it’s a horrible thing to read at a funeral. Lazarus’ family got him back, not metaphorically, for real, your child is still dead, your child isn’t coming back.