When my father was done with living, when breathing, seeing, being, was leached out, the hard part remaining, like an effigy atop a crypt, was beautiful.
“You wouldn’t have thought it,” my sister Suzie said, wiping the last bit of spittle from his lips. I called the undertaker.
After my father was too weak to climb the stairs to the room he shared with her, my mother cared for him in the family room downstairs. That’s where we were, with my father, when the minister came, inserting himself into the stillness.
“The undertaker called me,” he said when we expressed surprise. “Families like me to come.”
My mother offered coffee. He smiled gently at this foolishness, told her to talk to my father. “Say goodbye.”
She scowled, studied my father’s handsome head. Suzie had pulled the quilt up to his neck. “You shouldn’t have had to hurt so, Francis.”
The doorbell rang as the minister was asking the Lord to welcome home Francis, your faithful servant, my sisters and I exchanging smiles at our father being called a servant. I rose to answer it. The minister glared at me. “No.”
When he finished the undertaker was waiting outside, hat in hand, head bowed, as if he too was praying.
“I’m glad it’s early,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t want Trevor and Kylie seeing anything when they leave for school.” My father was especially fond of Trevor, the neighbors’ seven- year old son. They’d come over in early November when my father was well enough to have visitors.
“Now, we know Francis is going to die,” Trevor told my mother in an important tone, mortifying his parents.
My father liked bright kids, admired boldness. He laughed. “You’re all right, Trevor.”
This, my mother claimed, put Trevor’s parents at ease and broke the tension. “Somewhat.”
The minister pointed out vacation had started and the children would be asleep.
“Right,” my mother said.
He suggested she join a bereavement group the church sponsored.
“No need. I did my grieving when Francis was dying.”
After the minister left we waited in the kitchen as the undertaker and his helper carried my father out.
My mother told me to write the obituary. She handed me four pages covered in my father’s writing. “He wrote it last week but it’s no good.”
He’d started with his brother Harold, who’d died after ten days of life, three years before my father himself was born in 1930. Home births, he wrote. You don’t hear much about those anymore.
He said he’d been in the second to last class to attend the old Beckmeyer Grammar School. Before eighth grade graduation the teachers put on a weinie roast for the pupils. “We kids thought that was some fun!”
Between his Junior and Senior Year he’d attended Boys State held then at the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield.
The legionnaires told the boys they were lucky; this was the first Boys State since 1941. They didn’t have it during the war.
But his own particular good fortune, he wrote, came later that summer when he met his future wife, Elaine Schmidt, at the gas station owned by her aunt, Mrs. Minnie Thorpe. He’d pumped gas and Miss Schmidt worked at the lunch counter Mrs. Thorpe also owned.
He listed my mother’s parents, their address, her father’s occupation and the church where they’d married, saying he and my mother were married there as well, on July 17th, 1954, and it was where I, his oldest daughter Catherine, had been baptized fourteen months later.
His second daughter, Suzanne Marie, was born in the 42nd General Army Hospital in Tokyo, on January 8th, 1975.
“You still haven’t written anything,” my mother observed, walking past, my father’s bed linen in her arms.
His youngest daughter Amanda’s participation in community swim team, my marriage, my husband’s honorable discharge from the Coast Guard and his parents’ names, adding that my husband’s father served in the European theater during World War II, as a member of the Army Air Force. Since 1945, he wrote, this branch of the service has been known simply as the Air Force.
I asked my mother if I should mention his volunteer work for a local charity.
“He can’t do anything for them now.”
Should I list it as something people could donate to?
“No.”
“What about how he liked dogs?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
I wrote about his education, his marriage, his employment. The Army, too, mentioning that he’d retired from the Reserves as a colonel (full bird, which is the best, though I didn’t say.)
“Take that part out about his being a colonel. They don’t like people having something they don’t.”
“Maybe I should put in something personal, like about he played old guy basketball.”
“He wasn’t good at it.”
The three of us went with my mother when she took the obituary to the funeral home.
She went in and we stayed in the car, remembered my father making rhymes of our names. Amanda Sloper, famous Billy Goat Roper.
“I wish I’d done a better job,” I told my mother when she came back.
“It doesn’t matter. No one will read it.”
We were silly from lack of sleep. Punchy, my father called it. My dilemma and my mother’s response to it, made us laugh. My mother told us to stop. “What if someone sees you?”
That was funny too.
My mother said we couldn’t get an appointment today because it was their Christmas party but tomorrow we’d go back to select an urn for my father.
“Oh,” Suzie said. “A shopping opportunity.”
We could not stop laughing.
My mother said the funniest thing yet. “You never in your life saw anything so ugly as those urns they’ve got.”
When she began to cry she pulled over so Suzie could drive.
Jane Snyder lives in Spokane.