An Unsuited Man Near a Dead Man’s Chest

In which our Hero is unfortunately a little too nearly to the dearly departed.

When I got home from work, the day after the last entry, there was company at the house. Warm company at least, old friends so close that their family, so that was good. And one such aunt smiled a bright smile at me and told me, “I saw you at the funeral today.”

And for the first time in my life, I successfully pulled the jedi mind trick.

“You didn’t see me at the funeral,” I said, deep embarrassment making my smile probably just a little bit crazy.

“I know you weren’t there, but I thought I saw you!” she said. And feeling guilty for misleading my poor aunt, I looked to my dad who shared the same embarrassed expression, but he wasn’t telling the story so neither was I.

My phone rang in the middle of my morning.

“You have time?” my father asked me. “I’m at the church and I locked my keys in the car with the engine running. If you can’t I’ll just get a ride with someone else and we’ll take care of this later.”

Figure a funeral mass, with a eulogy, maybe a few people speaking about him, that’ll take about an hour. Enough time for me to go rescue my father. I can just slip into the back of the church and give him the key. Piece of cake.

“No, I’ll be there in about half an hour. Give me the address?”

I write the address down on a scrap of paper on my desk. Call a cab, grab my coat and head for the door. And moments later I’m on my way.

Moments after that I realize that I’ve forgotten the paper with the address at my desk. Well, I know the approximate streets, this can’t be that hard. And I have a data phone. So I look up the street number I remember. Nope, that’s not right. How about the name of the church. Wait, my dad never said the name of the church. Crap. Okay. How about just a search for churchs near there. Eliminate the one wrong denominations and there’s one church that matches. Just one. But the street address is way off. Crap. Okay, I’ll wing it.

We get to the church and I get the guy to pull in and slowly drive through the U-shaped parking lot. And at the other end of the U, almost directly next to the hearse is the gently puffing exhaust of a car still running.

The hearse driver is vigourously shooing us away but I hop out of the cab who takes off before I can tell him to wait for me. Fine, whatever, I’ll get the keys. I get into the van, look down to grab the keys, look back up as I’m sliding out of the car and oh holy crap the pallbearers are already carrying out the coffin.

The problem here is very simple. I’m too busy to go to the funeral. That’s the whole story for me not going to the funeral. Except I’m here, at the funeral service. In my work clothes so not outlandishly misdressed but oh holy crap this is not good.

So I scurry back a few cars to hide and watch for a chance to get the keys to my father. Who helps get the casket in the hearse and then looks around, so I peek around the van that hides me and wait for him to see. Which he does. And then he makes a gesture which seems like “I need the keys” so I head to him despite the fact that this brings me under the eyes of at least some of the mourners. Later that night, as we’re explaining the whole mess to my mom, he explains that he was letting me know he’d come to me.

(sigh) I know some folks saw me.

But my dad at least made it to the cemetary in his own car.

And I jogged around the church to leave in the other direction since most everybody was looking towards the hearse.

The boys had been fine at the viewing, but my mom says the funeral took a lot out of them. The younger one was crying. The older one was just red-eyed and silent.

And again, whatever the man was, whatever drove him from them, his boys loved their father. And at some level he loved them, I suppose.

But then I love my father and he loves me too. And while you can’t and shouldn’t compare, I have a lifetime of my parents showing that, beyond my ability to question. They may not always be right, they may not always handle it right, they may not always know what I need, but they are there for me.

Makes me think about how lucky I am in the constellation of people I have around me.