The Trip My Son Would Not Cancel

I called my son on a Tuesday morning to tell him his mother had died in the night, and the first thing he did was sigh.

I have gone over that sigh a thousand times since. It was not a gasp. It was not the sharp intake of breath a man makes when the floor drops out from under him. It was the sound a person makes when you have handed him an inconvenience. A slow letting out of air, the kind Grant used to make as a boy when I told him the fence still needed mending and the ballgame would have to wait. Forty-one years later, standing in my own kitchen with the phone shaking against my ear and Marion not yet cold in the next room, I heard that same sigh come down the line from Chicago, and I knew my son before he said a single word.

“Dad,” he said. “Okay. Okay. When’s the service?”

I told him I did not know yet. Doc Feeney had only just left. The funeral home in town, Ackerman and Sons, would not open until nine, and I had not slept, and my wife of fifty-one years was lying under the good quilt with her hands folded the way I had folded them, because I could not stand to see them fall open.

“Right,” Grant said. “The thing is, Dad, our flight’s Thursday. Sloane and I have had this booked since March. The river cruise. It’s the anniversary trip, the whole Rhine thing, the castles, it’s all prepaid, and you can’t get any of it back this close. So I’m just trying to figure out the timing here.”

I want to be fair to him, even now. I have tried all my life to be a fair man. So I will tell you that for one long moment I thought he was working out how to be in two places, that he was going to say he would move heaven and earth to stand at his mother’s graveside and then fly out after. That is what I thought a son would be doing on the other end of that call.

That is not what he was doing.

“Look,” he said, and I could hear him already moving, a drawer opening, keys, the ordinary sounds of a morning that for him was going to go on being ordinary. “I don’t want to be cold about this. But Mom would be the first one to tell me not to make a big deal out of it. You know how she was. She hated a fuss. She’d want me to go live my life. So here’s what I’m thinking. You do the service whenever it works for you, don’t hold it up on my account, and Sloane and I will do something when we’re back. A memorial. Something nice. In the spring, maybe, when the weather’s good.”