The General Who Recognized My Grandfather’s Ring

So I handled it. All of it. I picked the funeral home in Redbud, the plain oak casket, the small chapel with folding chairs because nobody expected a crowd, and nobody was wrong to expect that. Six thousand eight hundred dollars, paid out of savings I had been building for a truck I never bought, because I was not about to let the man who taught me to check my oil and say my prayers get buried on a payment plan like an afterthought.

Twelve people came, if you count the funeral director. My grandfather’s neighbor came, an old widow who used to trade him tomatoes for oil changes. The priest from the little church on Route 9 came, though my grandfather had not set foot in a pew in years, because the priest remembered him fixing the church’s ancient furnace every winter for free and refusing so much as a thank you casserole for it. My parents came forty minutes late, in dark clothes that still had the store crease in them, and left before the last hymn to beat traffic.

I stood beside that casket with my dress uniform on because it was the only thing I owned that felt like it matched the size of what we were doing, and I thought, not for the first time, that my grandfather had spent his whole life being underestimated by the two people who owed him the most.

Afterward I drove out to his house to start packing, because my parents had already mentioned, at the reception nobody but me and the priest attended, that the house should probably go on the market before winter. I went through his things alone. Old canvas coats that still smelled faintly of cedar and engine grease. A shoebox of VHS tapes with no labels. Mismatched mugs, a chipped blue one that said World’s Okayest Fisherman that made me laugh out loud in an empty house, which is a strange and lonely sound to make. Stacks of newspapers gone the color of weak tea, saved for reasons I will never know now.