I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.

It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.

Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.

In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.

The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.

I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.

Aunt Elaine was out in the driveway to meet us, smiling wide and full of hugs. “We’re so glad you could make it,” she said, beaming, and held me tight. “Now go on in the house and have you some fried chicken and ham biscuits. Mother’s in there just DYING to feed somebody and she just isn’t happy unless she’s waiting on someone. ”

It was true. There is a wrinkle in the genetic code of Southern women that expresses itself in times of crisis. It triggers a host of congruent reactions rendering men almost completely superfluous. The code causes a lot of bustling, preparing, no small amount of bossing and supportive clucking and massive comfort food preparation. During a funeral or emotional situation, the usual code of Southern euphemism shifts slightly — during a funeral situation, the phrase “bless his heart” is meant at face value and is no longer code for “what a retard.”

The counter at my aunt and uncle’s was COVERED in casserole, cream-covered broccoli, collard greens, rolls, cakes, pies, and a tremendous platter of Smithfield Ham, thinly sliced. I don’t know why, but all day, in my head, I have been referring to that platter as Southern Death Ham. And man, I kept going back to it, too.

While it was up to my father, uncle and me to greet guests today, our principle responsibility was to offer to help with something, or get our own iced tea — so we could get shot down with a “you just sit right there.” We had a lot of guests. Pop-Pop touched a lot of lives, and a lot of those folks came by with flowers or food, stopped and had a bite.

We found a bunch of my grandpa’s joke books, his favorites circled in shaky ink. We read them aloud to each other in the post-lunch, pre-dinner meal and in the long stretch after dinner, laughing tremendously. It was a comedian’s dream — most of the jokes KILLED, regardless of the timing, despite the occasional misreading or punchline interrupted by a visitor. All we had to do was imagine Pop-Pop telling the jokes and we’d either laugh ’til we were purple or groan and say “Oh yeah, he told that one a few times.”

He always had a joke ready. Not necessarily a new joke, either. You could hear the same joke from Pop-Pop 4 times in an hour. Sometimes he’d forget he told you, other times he didn’t care. “If you’ve heard this before, don’t stop me,” he’d say, then repeat it with the same glint in his eye he’d had ten minutes ago, cackling to himself in the buildup.

The graveside service is tomorrow morning at eleven, with a luncheon following. I still feel weird, a little surreal. I’m sad, but we’ve been so inundated with company and food that I haven’t noticed as much. I don’t know where the heavy shaggy bat has gone, but I haven’t felt him in a while. He’s buried under a pile of corny jokes and Smithfield Ham biscuits and I’m going to try and get some sleep before he gets hungry and climbs back out.