A Long Road Home

1

I awoke to overwhelming silence. The usual blare of my alarm clock, morning-radio show chatter, was conspicuously absent. I looked over at the radioactive-green light - 6:52 a.m. Eight minutes early. Still, the house was usually buzzing with activity at this time of morning: the shower drizzling scalding water across my brother's skin until he yells obscenities, the din of dishes being washed and dropped while my mother sighs audibly - but it was all gone. The strange silence, like the hush before a thunderstorm, crept eerily along my spine, spider-like in its barely-there touch. I shivered for the last eight minutes before commercials began to scream from my bedside, urging me to drink Instant Breakfast and buy a Mazda; as the irritating jingle chimes in: "picky people pick Hiley Mazda", I groan and smack the snooze button, grateful for the nine minutes of sanity before the easily-replaceable DJs cacophonously clamor back to life.2

I dilly-dallied as much as I could before taking to the steps, the road to the bizarrely stale, dead air downstairs. My hair smelled burnt, courtesy of two tortoise-slow straightenings, and nobody could say my makeup didn't look flawless, but eventually I had to get to school. I tiptoed downstairs, trying not to disturb the uneasy stillness.3

With the first millisecond glance at the kitchen, I was aware that something was disastrously wrong - my brother had left quietly for school twenty minutes ago, but my mother was still standing, packing a lunch that didn't exist. Her hands flew through the air, peanut-buttering a sandwich without bread, a knife, or even peanut butter. Her eyes had the puffy, red look of someone who had either not slept or had been crying; given the glisten on her cheeks, so jarringly unlike the beaded shine of the sweat that menopause had so cruelly bestowed upon her, I would say it had been both. Immediately I wished I could turn back upstairs. Whatever the news was, I didn't want to hear it.4

Wordlessly I walked into the kitchen, plopped myself down on a bar stool, and waited for her to speak. She didn't; she couldn't see me through her hands, through the tears that soaked through even them. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know. But I had a sinking feeling that I already did.5

They had told us that he would get better, that he would make it through. He fell while walking up the steps to the house; yes, it was a head wound, but it wasn't fatal. 6

"Grandpa died this morning," my mom's voice whispered, cracking with the weight of the sentence and echoing the suspicion running through my mind. She dissolved into her hands again and I wondered what it must be like to lose a father. I pushed away the devastation bubbling in my gut, threatening to ruin the makeup that I had, for the first time ever, perfected. I didn't reply; what could I say that would make the least bit of sense right now? I comprehended nothing. Memories flitted through my head, exploding like hand grenades all across the surface of my brain. Fourteen birthday parties, each summer: would there be a fifteenth that he would never see? Story time before bed, featuring the big blue bear and my personal planet, Petunia, with some submarines thrown in as he began to nod off into his own dreamland. I remember wondering what he dreamt about. I felt my dog's fur flutter past the skin on my foot; it was Grandpa who taught me not to be ticklish. Emptiness began to threaten my heart.7

"We're flying out to Iowa this afternoon, after you get out of school," my mom said tonelessly. "It'll only be a few days, so all you'll need are clothes for the wake and the funeral and one other day." I nodded as I heard the bus, absentmindedly grabbing my backpack and walking away. When I peeked behind me, she still hadn't looked up.8

The February chill had hit Texas hard that year, dropping into the twenties on that early morning as I ran from my door to the bus, cursing my lack of a coat. It felt colder that morning, as if the chill that usually stopped at my skin had settled unshakingly into my bones. Even the heat on the bus couldn't warm me. I thanked my lucky bus-route for picking me up as the first stop, giving me time to don my headphones and disappear into a different world, where the other kids on the bus didn't exist. Even so, today my world was blurred and grey - no matter what song I listened to, all I could think about were all the things I never asked him but always wondered. Was he scared when he saw the prisoners in Dachau in 1945? How did he meet my grandmother? Was it love at first sight? How did he handle growing up without a father? What was his strongest memory? Hidden behind my sweatshirt hood and the blast of tuneless music, I realized I knew nothing about the man I cherished most of all.9

I wandered through the halls at school in a daze, more silent than usual. Nobody noticed; lately, silence had been my defining characteristic, and it was not unusual for me to look sullen and somber. This time, though, I felt ashamed of all the times I was bitter and despairing for no reason at all. I had forgotten grief and its heart-wrenching ability to break down everything into meaningless chunks of matter, floating and colliding in space. All those feelings were staggeringly unlike the emptiness I felt on a daily basis and I loathed them. I despised every unsettling emotion that had so unceremoniously made its way back into my heart, barreling past the blockades I had built up. Every recollection of wishes made on birthday cakes, summer sun, rainbows, and whirlpools reminded me that things would never be the same again. 10

I spent each class compiling memories, afraid that if I didn't, they would fade away, disintegrating and decomposing like his body surely would, left in the cold bare ground. Teachers seemed scared of the shine in my eyes, telltale of a broken heart, and didn't ask me questions in class; I sat in the back corners and scribbled word after word that would be barely recognizable the next morning. In English, we were reading As I Lay Dying and Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness ramblings suddenly became clear, perfect representations of the flow of my mind and the sudden break from constraints - his grammatical, mine emotional. When the last bell rang, my only memory of the school day was this quote, which I have never forgotten: "I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon."11

When I got home, things were only slightly different than before. Instead of standing shattered next to the sink, my mother had retreated to the bathroom, chain-smoking and staring eyelessly at the painting on the wall. When asked a question, she would respond, but that instinctual acknowledgement was all that she was capable of. My dad quietly directed us to pack and meet downstairs at 4:30, when we would leave for the airport - for that all-too-important flight to a place nobody wanted to go.12

It was still frigid outside as we loaded the car; for once, my mother was not the last person out the door, but only because she sat zombie-like in the passenger seat, gazing vacantly at the stack of papers in her lap. They were letters of all types, a vast array of remembrances that seemed to me like they could only injure her further. Still, she held them white-knuckledly, as if loosening her grasp on them meant letting go of her father altogether.13

As we made our way to the airport, I was thrown back into memories of our annual - sometimes bi-annual - fourteen-hour drive to Iowa. We took to the streets through hell or high water, one memorable trip even being featured on the evening weather report with a tornado less than a mile behind us, our white suburban decked out with a car-top carrier held down with left-over bungee cords. We checked into a hotel that night and were surprised and terrified to see ourselves in the news recap and even more astounded to see the completely destroyed theme park that we had passed just an hour before the tornado hit. 14

The trips to Iowa, though, were never as hard for me as the ones back: photographic memories of my grandparents standing outside of their chocolate-brown white-shuttered house, waving us away, slid behind my eyes. There was always an urgent, melancholic feeling in my heart as they faded from view, as though I would never see them again. 15

The airport at 4:45 on a Monday afternoon was barely active. There was hardly a line at security, and we sat reticently at Gate 17 with only a handful of other people, waiting for the plane to arrive. We rarely flew to Iowa; this may have been one out of only two times that I had boarded a plane to Cedar Rapids. It was horribly cramped with only three seats across, and my 6'4" brother could barely fold himself into a seat. I heard an inauspicious creaking next to me as I was pushed into the window and I couldn't be sure if it was his bones or just the rickety airplane breathing its last breaths. I hoped with all my strength that it was the former.16

The majority of the flight was spent in leaky, dark-gray clouds, which I viewed as an ill-boding view of what awaited us. My mother was poring over her letters with shaking hands, fingering the once-neat script of my grandfather, grown shaky over the years due to a stroke he had had two years earlier. I didn't realize, until that very moment, how strikingly ancient he had become. 17

It's not as though he lived a short life - he had just turned eighty in December, and his last birthday celebration had certainly been memorable. There was a hill in their backyard, unbelievably precipitous when I was young but growing more and more complanate each new time I saw it; it was perfect for our outlandish fourth-of-July family reunions and the fireworks that inevitably came along with them. For his eightieth birthday, my uncles Jim and Jeff provided a firework spectacular more astounding than I had ever seen - blues and reds and golds and purples, explosions even more beautiful in their booming noisiness than in their sight. The sounds echoed throughout what seemed like the whole world and my heart automatically timed its beats to match their bangs and blasts; when I went to sleep that night, I could still smell the gunpowder and photo-negative images of blurry neons gamboled around the insides of my eyes. 18

The memory of this final birthday party, the last time I saw him, brought tears finally to the surface of my eyes. I blinked and a blackened drop slid from my eyelash to my cheek, courtesy of the morning's over-application of mascara. I quickly wiped the rest off on my hand and marveled at the little black smudges, like tire streaks on racetracks, so indicative of a crash.19

The Cedar Rapids airport smelled like my childhood, a mix of Iowa farmland meets technology with some emptiness thrown in, and I was momentarily comforted until I realized why I was there. The automatic doors swooshed open and a barrage of ice-crystal air hit my face and chilled my organs through my thin sweatshirt and jeans. I wondered just how many miles I was north of home -nowhere I wanted to be, for sure. My mom was pushing past us to a familiar car, a green minivan that to me meant the arrival of playmates on those sometimes-lonely summer days. My uncle Jim got out, properly bundled for the weather, and my mom collapsed into him. They stood there for what seemed like an eternity as my fingers became the mauve color I now associate with the inklings of frostbite and my teeth ground and chattered until I was afraid that there would be none left. 20

"Nice to see you guys," Jim said, "though I wish the occasion was different." Silence hung heavy in the air as we all nodded and looked at our feet. My dad took charge and asked Jim about the seemingly record-cold winds. "What?" he replied, "This? Nah, this is a warm winter."21

I shivered as we climbed into the car, thanking whatever lucky stars I had that the heater in the van finally worked as it blew hairdryer-heavy air on us. My fingers began to tingle as they returned to the world of the living, little pinpricks all across the surface. My dad and Jim chatted aimlessly, just talking to fill the silence, as my brothers and I stared out the window at the wintry landscape, so unlike our own. My mom, in the wake of seeing her family, had pasted on an attempt at a smile, but the downcast shine in her eyes gave her away.22

As we turned down the street to Merry Hill Lane, the house at the end of the road seemed sinister, lit by an empty glow from a hollow cloud, too heavy for the sun but too light for its smoke-colored companions; my heartbeat shook as I realized that the blankness outside was only a warning of what awaited us inside. My grandma, in that lonely house, was left awaiting a return that would never come, spending frozen winter nights by herself. She couldn't even drive. There was no escape for her.23

Nothing had physically changed about the house. The white shutters still hung perfectly against the brown background, the red, white, and indigo flowers were still perfectly fenced-in with the miniature white picket fence, and the Uncle Sam head still stared ominously from its perch above the doorbell. But still, it was obvious that there was something missing - a presence, without which the whole house seemed off-kilter. It was eerie. I didn't want to step inside.24

As we came to the front of the house, I was reminded of just that past December, when we were in Iowa for his final birthday. The house had an air of festivity and I could almost believe it was like the Christmas of years past, when my older brother and I would sneak from the second floor to the basement at odd hours of the night, hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of Santa as he disappeared up the chimney. This year, Grandma was all too frail to take the basement stairs. Grandpa always seemed vastly healthier than her, accompanying us on walks down the hill to the creek or out to pick raspberries in the summers, while Grandma was chained to the counter by the breathing machine that had come along with her emphysema. Most hours of the day or night, she sat at her stool, still as a painting, leaned over her crossword puzzle. Today was no exception.25

"Hi, Grandma!" we all chorused as we walked through the door. Her head, far too large for her emaciated body, looked up and smiled as she welcomed us in. I walked around the sleeping dachshund, an evil little demon of a dog, to give her a hug. Her body was paper-thin, almost as if the skin shed in flakes like snakes' skin do, and I was afraid that I would snap one of her osteoporotic bones if I squeezed too tightly. There was an empty stool across the counter from her, its cover untouched, as though no one had sat in it in a while. We all knew why. It was his chair.26

Grandma vanished into her crossword puzzle as my younger brother, JJ, and I took the stairs to the room we would be staying in. Mike, our older brother, always took the basement as his, like it was some sort of reward for being born first. I always resented it; the basement seemed to me a holy location, a place I was rarely allowed when Mike took over. 27

Upstairs, the walls were lined with old sheet music: "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "Red Sails in the Sunset", "Girl of My Dreams", and "The Song Is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)" were all framed and set together, like a four-paned window into a time period I'd never know. When I was young and hadn't heard any of the songs save Yankee Doodle, I would make up melodies and words and let them play me off to sleep. Sometimes I would ask Grandpa to sing them to me instead of telling a story, but he never sang those songs. Every time I asked, he sang either "K-K-K-Katy" or "Brown Eyes", a song he used to say was written for me. My eyes welled up with tears when I realized that he would never sing to me again - yet another aspect of childhood lost as adolescence dawned.28

I glanced over at the clock: 8:42. Not quite early enough for bed, which meant I'd have to go downstairs and endure the stolid silences, or even worse, tear-filled reminisces. I didn't know if it was early enough for the adults to begin sharing their favorite 'remember-when's, but if it was, I wasn't ready to hear it yet. I wasn't ready to believe he was really gone. I turned down the sheet and climbed into bed, waiting resolutely for my eyes to grow heavy.29

The morning air leaked through the window as I woke up, making ripples in the curtains like fish plunging back into murky water after a jump. My bones were chilled under the thin comforter that had been laid out on the bed, still unchanged since summertime – sunnier days. Today was the day of the wake. I shivered under my blanket, which had begun collecting icy condensation, for a few minutes as I contemplated the day. Could I stay calm? I had never been to a wake before, and I didn’t know what to expect.30

My mother bustled into the room with a fervor that had been altogether absent the day before and virtually lifts me from the bed. “You need to be getting ready,” she admonished me, despite the fact that the clock stated resolutely that it was 10.12 a.m. and the wake wasn’t until two. I sighed and began ruffling through my bag, throwing dress pants and a shirt onto the bed before embarking on a trip to the kitchen for breakfast. 31

Every year of my life, my grandparents had asked us what our favorite cereals were, so that when we came to visit, they would have things other than Frosted Flakes and Special K for us to eat. In the pantry were the half-filled boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cocoa Krispies that had likely been there for not mere months, but years, waiting patiently for our return. It was sad to think about: sometimes while we were visiting, Grandpa would buckle down and eat a bowl of our sugar-cereal, grumbling benevolently about the horrible taste, but only to make us laugh. When we were gone, the cereal didn’t get eaten – and now he was gone, too, so the likelihood of the cereal ever disappearing from the pantry was almost nil. 32

Grandma was still uncharacteristically silent as she did the crossword puzzle; I wondered vaguely if she had been lonely this past week, with him helpless in the hospital. She never expected that he wouldn’t come home – no one did. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but I couldn’t; somewhere along the way, I had become an island and I couldn’t seem to connect anymore.33

After breakfast, I went back upstairs, relishing in the sensation of the plush crimson carpet between my toes and for the first time in a long time, noticed the Months of the Year paintings on the wall, rife with cherub angels and floral bouquets. They had always been beautiful, but I stopped paying attention after thirteen years unchanged. I stopped in the hallway between the master bedroom, where my parents slept now, and the room I always slept in; it was one of my favorite places in the house. The entire hallway was filled with black and white photographs of my mother and her siblings as children, chronically them all the way up to their marriages and their kids – there were even a few baby pictures of myself up there. More interestingly, though, were the pictures on the other side of the hallway: family photos from when my grandparents were children, yellowed at the edges, an exquisitely grey wonderland. I’d often tried to picture what the locations and people looked like in color, but like in the movie Pleasantville, the world itself seemed colored like newsprint photographs, in blurred neutrals. 34

I began to get ready for the wake; my nice clothes were fine for a Texas winter, but in Iowa I wondered if I would freeze. It didn’t really matter. My bones had been frozen since I’d been here – since before I’d been here. I kind of liked it. It was a numbness that I had been striving for for a long time but had never really been able to grasp. As I painted my face with makeup, trying in vain to look less-than-exhausted – beautiful instead of the burnt-out, black-circled girl I had become. It didn’t occur to me at the time to not put on mascara.35

At 1:30, we piled into my uncle Don’s box-shaped Scion, a horrendous mark upon the landscape that I hoped would soon see a scrap-metal pile. The seats were uncomfortably tall, and we sat straight-backed with our hands on our knees, making sure not to touch each other. I was a little frightened and a little interested to see what was to come. I had heard of these things, but nobody ever said anything besides “I went to a wake.” Never any discussion of what it was.36

We arrived at the funeral home, an unassuming brown building with a small sign – it was one of those places that didn’t need advertising. If you were going there, you knew where it was. Inside, the stench of flowers was everywhere. They littered every open space, and further in – where I could see a casket – there were even more, every color that flowers could be, most glaringly unnatural. We ran into my other uncle, Jeff, and a couple of my cousins, all looking massively uncomfortable, as if their skin was itching just being in the place. My aunt ushered me to a sign-in sheet, which I found odd, given that obviously I was here. I was grabbed from my life and deposited down in this hellish frozen tundra, only to be presented with the double-edged sword of death right in my stomach. I didn’t want to be here. But I was. And now, nobody could contest that, because my black-inked swirly script could attest to it.37

I wandered into the main room. The casket was on display like some sort of deranged buffet table. It was surrounded by flowers, and only now could I tell the real reason. The closer I got, the heavier and thicker the air became. There was an underlying fetor that I couldn’t name yet. The casket got closer and closer, but right before looking in, I turned to a photomontage, depicting scenes from his entire life. As a boy, playing in the Fayette farmland. Teen-aged, carrying a gun, patriotically surrendering his youth to his country. Mid-twenties, marrying my grandmother, smiling widely with cake knife in hand. Middle-aged, in his American flag button-down shirt at one of our Fourth-of-July reunions, his children running around at his feet. Older, posing with my two uncles with a pheasant in his hand. It was like watching him age before my eyes. I turned away before the tears could start.38

I knew the only place left for me to go, the only place I could get closure, was toward the casket. Still, its smell and the way it somehow changed the air around it frightened me. I watched as my brother walked to it, wincing as he looked down, and walked away, just slightly quicker than he came. My fists were clenched so tightly that I could feel my nails pressing half-moon indentions into my palms. I tried to draw blood as my feet drew me closer. 39

It was alien. It resembled mostly a plasticine creation of a person who was not, was never anything even remotely like my grandfather. It was made-up to look peculiar and inhuman and its hands were folded across its chest in a way that made it seem like it was sleeping. Its eyelids were a strange lavender color and the cheeks were hollowed to the point that I could practically see the tongue pressing against the sides. It was sickening. I suppressed a gag as tears started flowing freely from my eyes. “It’s not him,” I choked, mostly to myself.40

I recognized the scent now. It was the scent of skin decomposition, staved away for just a day with chemicals by some masked magician. The room was overflowing with invisible blood that I could just see, dripping down the walls. I touched the hand of the wax-figure posing as my grandfather and its iciness burnt a hole in my finger, in the same way that getting sprayed with keyboard cleaner did. I had to get out of this room, so entrenched in the dissolution of spirit.41

I stumbled away, trying not to let the image of the mutation that was not my grandpa take place of the memories I had of him. It was difficult; every time I closed my eyes, I saw the thing. I was afraid it would open its bloodless eyes and try to steal my soul, too. I hid in the bathroom, watching in the mirror as my mascara pooled and formed in the circles beneath my eyes, darkening them, every now and again spilling out in little rivers down my cheeks. I looked a mess, but I didn’t want to wipe it off. It was a battle scar from a foe I never expected. 42

I sat stoically in another uncomfortable, straight-backed chair with an absurd floral print on it for the remaining hours, only speaking when directly asked a question. I tried not to think about where I was and what accompanied me just one room over. It was just so cold, so unreal. I shivered.43

That evening, the entire family went out to dinner, jovially reminiscing about all the fun times they had with him, all the silly things he had told them. I was still shaking from my encounter with the thing, so I just listened. Most of the things they were saying were before my time: summer days in the seventies’ and eighties’, college-age reunions. My dad laughed about the first time he met them and realized that this was a family he was marrying into, not just my mother. I laughed along with them, but I was still frozen inside. I just wanted to get back and go to sleep, hopefully without nightmares of the thing to disturb my rest.44

After dinner, my aunt pulled me aside. “Would you recite ‘In Flanders Fields’ at the funeral tomorrow?” she asked, her voice soft under all the outside chatter. 45

“Sure,” I replied blankly. I had memorized the poem when I was ten, much to my grandpa’s delight; it was his favorite. Now it was mine too. There was something about poppies, something about describing death as sleeping, that was comforting to me. As if at any moment, they could wake up and encompass you in their giant arms, and you would be safe. For once.46

That night, I dreamt of daisies with faces. They were all screaming.47

I awoke with a start. It was still dark outside. The moonlight on the curtains cast strange shadows over all the ancient wooden toys that my grandparents had played with when they were children. My favorite was an elephant that rocked its way down a ramp - the knock knock knock of the wooden loggers, chopping down a toy tree like seesaws, back and forth rocking prairie waves and his crinkly smile as he set the elephant on its ramp, watching as it tottered up down up down down down with a resounding smack when it reached the bottom. Memories flooded my mind, broken-down things that always got washed away with the daylight. I didn’t realize, until now, how lost I was. I curled up in a ball, gasping for air because my nose was stuffed with tears, and waited for morning to come.48

I was sprawled across the bed when my mother came in to wake me. “How did you sleep?” she asked blandly, not waiting for an answer, as I struggled to control my creaking bones. My eyes had been nailed wide open since I had woken up from a now-fuzzy nightmare. I looked to the corner of the room, where in my half-asleep daze I thought I had seen him – but it was just a memory. 49

“Fine,” I answered, knowing she wasn’t listening.50

“We’re leaving for the funeral in an hour,” she said, ignoring me as she shuffled back and forth from her room to the bathroom. I sighed and stole another glance over at the corner. Still empty.51

“Do we have to go outside much at this?” I asked sleepily.52

“Well, yes, for the burial,” she responded.53

“I don’t own a coat,” I reminded her.54

“You can borrow one from the closet,” she said, obviously frustrated, throwing a heavy black thing at me.55

“Okay.”56

At an ungodly hour of the morning, I once again found myself in my uncle’s ugly Scion; I wondered what I could possibly have done wrong in life to have made three free days off school be spent in such misery. The church was familiar; it was the same one I had gone to Vacation Bible School in all those many years ago, when God and Jesus still seemed faintly real to me. The pews, which I had sat in for many a Christmas Eve service, seemed rigid and uncomfortable, creaking as my heavy family sat down. I wondered if they would break with the weight of not only my family, but the sadness they were carrying as well. 57

The sermon passed by, a glowing description of my grandfather at his very best; it made the strongest of us cry. My voice stuck in my chest, breaking unevenly when we were asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer. I stared at the wreath of flowers set atop the casket, the stained-glass cross with Jesus splayed across it, suffering, creating a colorful backdrop. A strange brownish light fell across my lap, courtesy of Mary’s hair in the window to my left. I focused on any and every thing besides the packet of paper in my lap, listing my name as speaker only one row down.58

“Now, his granddaughter, Katie, will recite the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’,” pastor Jeff said in his somewhat-squeaky preacher voice. I stood shakily, hoping that I didn’t trip on the way up there, or on the words once I began. When I got to the podium, I looked out at all the tear-stained faces and sighed quietly. It didn’t seem fair. At these things, the dead got so built up that we forgot to remember that they were gone forever. 59

“In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow…” I began, reciting emotionlessly, just a bunch of words randomly strung together, but they seemed to mean something to the people in the audience. When I finished, they clapped, and I made my way back to my seat, holding back tears, because just when I hoped to feel him most – when I recited that poem for him, not for the people left behind – I felt nothing at all.60

The men lifted the casket, and we filed out, getting back into our cars. I ignored the fact that we were driving to a cemetery and was simply grateful to be gone from that unholy church that would now only remind me of death.61

The wind was blowing violently, sending icy rain into my hair, running down my frigid skin. My thin skirt blew around my knees as I huddled closer in the enormous coat my mom had thrown at me – one of his coats, from the smell. It was the scent of warm hugs and war stories. I pretended he was holding me as someone handed me a deep-red rose, a brilliant contrast to the grey-white landscape. I stared at it for a minute, wondering what I was supposed to do. Then I saw the American flag draped across the casket and heard thirteen gunshots echo off into the distance while ‘Taps’ swelled with the beats of my heart. 62

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the pastor said solemnly, “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life…” My heart stopped. It was over; he was gone. There was no hope left once they began the lowering process, once they condemned him to the earth, where he would be devoured with deadly abandon. There was no hope. He was gone.63

Everyone began walking toward the hole, dropping roses in, saying goodbye. I stood at the edge for a few minutes, staring into his physical home for eternity. I could only hope that some sort of heaven existed. If not, there was nothing left. I grabbed an extra rose from the basket, kissed it, and threw it in. “Goodbye,” I whispered, holding tight to my chest the rose I had initially been given.64

I walked back with my family toward the car. As I sat in the back seat, staring out the window at the darkened hole in the earth, tears filled my eyes. I was leaving, this time for the last time. He would never wave goodbye to me again as we drove the long, gravelly road out to the street, to home. I closed my eyes and pretended he was there, giving me a final smiling wave.65