On the morning of my father’s memorial service, my brother reads me his eulogy as practice.
“Yes, it’s good,” I say. I don’t read him mine because I don’t know how many recitations I have in me. What if it’s only one?
Then we go to the copy shop to print out 100 orders of service. We spend an inordinate amount of time deciding between two off-white shades.
“This one,” I say, holding up the sample to the man behind the counter.
“Great!” he says. “My condolences.”
At 3 p.m., we start unfolding chairs in the courtyard outside the Moose Room — named for the stuffed moose head above its fireplace — confident it won’t rain. I haven’t been in the Moose Room or the library next door in years. Everything seems smaller, except for the moose, which is huge.
With so much to think about now, I’m confident my emotions will stay under control until I’ve read my eulogy. Then the firefighters in uniform show up in their fire truck and tears stream down my lower eyelids. It turns out I’m very susceptible to civic ceremony.
My brother reads his eulogy. My nephews read their own words of remembrance. My eulogy includes some of the speech I gave nearly three years ago on my father’s 100th birthday, in which I reminded people how old he was: born in the midst of Warren Harding’s presidency; before not only the advent of television but before radio. As I speak, I try not to look at the fire truck.
The next morning, on the way to the funeral, traffic is backed up out of town: someone is using a cherry picker to cut a hedge on the bend near the church. We text each other about the obstruction, but for most of us it’s too late to continue.
When my brother and I arrive at the cemetery, four soldiers are already waiting there – two young and two old – to perform certain tasks that my father is entitled to as a veteran. Fawns jump around between the gravestones and eat the flowers left by other mourners.
“It seems so unreal,” I say, watching her.
“They will leave if we start shooting,” says one of the soldiers.
My father’s ashes were placed in a wooden box that once belonged to his father. There was some back and forth with the cemetery people – they have rules about what you can bury – but I wasn’t involved and now it seems to be settled: The box is there, on a draped table in front of the headstone where we buried my mother 26 years ago. I haven’t been back since that day.
My brother has given us a rough plan of how events will unfold. He will greet everyone and then say a few words, and at some point my sister and I will read poetry. That’s all I know, so I’m not prepared for the moment when the two young soldiers salute the wooden box while the two old soldiers fire rifle bursts from the hill above us. Then one of the old soldiers plays taps on a bugle. It turns out I’m very susceptible to this sort of thing too.
The two young soldiers then ceremoniously unfold and fold an American flag before handing it to me.
“Thank you,” I say. But the young soldier doesn’t let go of the flag. Instead, he looks straight at me and says, “On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation…” It turns out I’m susceptible to a lot of things.
Only after I’ve struggled through my poem do I begin to really grasp it all. The funeral guests are mostly family members – close relatives, cousins and in-laws – as well as the carers who looked after my father in his final months. That was lovely, I think. And now it’s almost over, and then there’s lunch.
At a rehearsed signal, two gravediggers pull up in a truck and pull back the green carpet that lies over a neat, square hole previously dug in the ground. I can’t risk eye contact with my brother or sisters at this point because I know we’re all thinking the same thing: there’s no way this box will fit in this hole.
The gravediggers exchange glances. They too seem worried. One of them lifts the box and places it on the hole, where it remains stuck like a cork in the neck of a bottle.
I will always be extremely grateful to the other gravedigger – the one who carefully knelt down, placed both palms on the lid of the box and pressed with all his weight.
