I Am Not There

Went to my own. A man ought to, at least the once. Turns out it's about the best place there is to gather evidence.

They put me in a suit I'd never have picked. That's the first thing I clocked, drifting in over the folding chairs like a bad smell nobody could name. Somebody dressed me wrong. A stiff dark thing off a mortuary rack, buttoned to the throat, and they'd parted my hair on the fool side, the side it never went, and folded my hands on my chest in a way they never once rested in sixty-one years of living. My whole life those hands were either working or shaking. Nobody ever folded them. In that box I looked like a wax dummy of a man I used to know a little. The cheeks too full. The color painted on, that pink that isn't any color a person is, laid over a gray that no brush was going to hide from a man who'd spent his life looking close at things. I looked embalmed, which of course I was, and I'll come around to that, because the embalming is the whole case standing right there in an open casket for anybody with eyes. But first let me tell you what a funeral looks like when you're the one soul in the room nobody can see.

It looks like a stage. All the actors standing on their marks, hitting their lines, and one empty chair down front that isn't empty at all.

The morning was too pretty for it. That's the kind of joke the universe likes. There was a green tent staked out at the cemetery, that awful artificial funeral-home green, and the folding chairs in their rows on the fake grass, and past the tent the mountains stood up hard and blue and did their level best to make the whole thing mean something. Wasatch to the east catching the light. A dry wind moving the flowers around on the stands and worrying the hem of the tent. And the girl got up front to read a poem.

Paige. My stepdaughter. The one who made the soup. The quiet one I was always good to, and I want that on the record, I was good to that kid, whatever else this notebook has to say. She got up with a little printed card shaking in her hand, and she read, and it matters which poem, because the universe never once misses its chance at a joke and it surely did not miss this one. She read the old one. The one that goes: Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep.

I about came apart, whatever a thing like me has left to come apart with. Because there I was. Not down in the grave. Not laid out in the box behind her. Standing three feet off the girl's shoulder, close enough to read the card over it, not there and not sleeping, exactly and precisely the way the poem swore up and down I wouldn't be. Every word of it true. Every word aimed straight at me and not one of them meant that way. And not one soul under that green tent knew the dead man was leaning in over the reader to catch his own send-off. Two of the wives in their good dark coats, and I'll say this for my crooked record: that's two more than some men get. My boys, both of them, big men gone small in the chairs, looking at their shoes. The grandkids fidgeting. My sister off to one side, dry-eyed and rod-straight, not grieving so much as standing guard, already certain in her bones who had done this to me and only waiting on the rest of the world to catch up. All of them dabbing at the poem, and the poem was just plain reporting the weather to the only man it fit. Whoever picked it picked truer than they will ever in their lives know. And it was read to me by the very girl who helped put me in the ground. Hold that one. Set it somewhere you won't lose it. It comes back around, and when it comes it comes hard.

My oldest gave the eulogy. My daughter. She stood up with a folded page and her voice not quite holding, and she was kind about me. Kinder than the evidence warranted. Kinder than I ever once arranged to deserve. She told a couple of the good stories, the ones that made me sound like a father instead of a rumor, and left out the whole long shelf of the other kind, and I stood there with whatever a ghost has where a throat used to be, and it closed right up on me. There it is, I thought. There's the one clean thing I made in sixty-one years of making a mess, standing up front in her good clothes, being decent in public about a man who lied to her about his own address right up to the end. She didn't cry until she sat back down. I saw that. I saw it from a place she'll never know I was standing.

And the boy carried my casket. Marcus. Sarah's son, a genuinely good kid, the one who'd run my wedding in a living room a few years back, read the words off his phone and pronounced us man and wife and grinned about it. Now here he came in a borrowed jacket with the weight of me on his shoulder, jaw set, doing it right, bearing the old man up the little rise to the hole in the ground. And I thought, if a thing like me can go warm about anything, I went warm about that. The stepkid I'd been good to, carrying me to my rest with his back straight and his eyes wet. There's a decent boy in a rotten house, I thought. Good for him. Good for one of them.

I did not yet know he'd carried me once already.

But that's a later page. That's the worst one in the whole notebook, and I haven't earned the telling of it yet, so let it lie.

Here's what a man in my trade notices at a funeral, though, once he quits being sad long enough to actually look at the machine in front of him. The speed. The pure speed of the thing.

My grave wasn't even filled in, and I mean that plain literal. She'd had me drained and set and painted inside the week, before my own children could stand over me long enough to ask a single honest question, and I've laid that out already, but stand it up here next to the rest, because here is where it starts to talk. Because already the grabbing had started. Already, with the dirt not turned yet, there was lawyer-talk moving through the folding chairs like a draft. Already Sarah was moving on the accounts, on the house, on the boxes and the papers and the things, moving quicker than any grieving widow that ever lived has moved, quick and sure and organized, a woman working a list. And here is the frame that turned whatever I've got left for a stomach. Before the dirt was even tamped down over the box, while the mourners were still finding their car keys, Paige came out across that cemetery lot, past the headstones, to my daughter's car at the curb, the grandkids buckled up in the back seat with their faces at the glass, and she leaned in the window and told my daughter that her mother was suing her.

At the graveside. The poem still hanging in the dry air over the tent. I am not there, I do not sleep. And the very same mouth that had just read those words to a weeping tent, three hundred feet and about four minutes later, bent to a car window with children in the back seat to serve papers on my own daughter over her own father's fresh grave.

Now grief is a slow thing. A stunned, useless, sit-down-in-the-hallway kind of thing. I have watched it settle over a hundred faces from up here since, and I promise you it does not move fast, and it sure as anything does not file. Grief can't find its shoes. Grief forgets to eat. What I was watching move under and around that green tent was not grief. It was a schedule. It was people running a plan against a clock, hitting their marks, reading their poem, carrying their box, serving their papers, all of it timed. And a plan that is loaded and ready to fire the very day of the funeral is a plan that was drawn up before the funeral. Which is to say before the death. You do not sue three days into the worst heartbreak of your life. You sue three days into a job. A job somebody has been waiting a long, patient time to see finished.

That is when I felt it, cold and total and certain, the thing I'd been skating past the whole notebook, skating past because a man doesn't want to know it about his own kitchen table. I was not looking at a woman who snapped. I was not looking at grief gone crooked, or panic, or a bad night that got away from somebody. I was looking at a machine. A machine that had just run its cycle clean through, start to finish, and shut itself off, still warm, humming, satisfied.

And a machine has a maker.

Trouble is, I couldn't see the whole of it yet. Not from one turn of the crank. You cannot read a machine off a single stroke, I knew that much from the bench, you can't call the fault till you've watched the thing run through more than once and marked what it does the same way twice. And, worse luck for us both, it did run twice. It ran again. Three years on, on somebody else, the same cold cycle, the same clean hands, and I had to stand and watch that one too.

Let me tell you about the second body. Let me tell you what happened to Paige.