At my father’s funeral, the gravedigger grabbed my wrist and whispered, “Your father’s coffin is empty.”
Before I could even process his words, he shoved an old brass key into my hand.
Then he warned me:
“Don’t come home.”
Seconds later, I got a text from my mother.
And I understood that my father’s death had been planned long before the day he was supposed to die.
The funeral was over.
The last notes of the anthem still seemed to hang faint and cold over the cemetery as the mourners began to disperse among the gravestones.
There were slow hugs.
Folded handkerchiefs.
Downcast eyes.
Former Army officers saluted my father’s grave with a solemnity that, at another time, would have completely broken me.
My mother stood by the hearse.
She wore an immaculate black coat and accepted condolences with the exact fragility everyone expected of a widow.
Two cousins supported her by the elbows.
A neighbor offered her water.
A man I didn’t recognize spoke to her with his head bowed, as if grief were a language that had to be whispered.
I couldn’t move.
I stood before the mound of freshly turned earth, my boots barely sinking into the mud and my hands closed in my coat pockets.
The earth smelled of rain.
The flowers smelled too sweet.
The wind stirred the black ribbons of the funeral wreaths and made the white stems of the lilies tremble.
Everything seemed right.
