The Red Suit At Dad’s Funeral

In August, Dad asked to speak to our family’s attorney, Barry Collins, alone, three separate times. Mr. Collins had handled the store’s affairs and most of my father’s paperwork for almost thirty years, since before I was born, a quiet, careful man who wore the same brown suit to every appointment and never once, in all the years I’d known him, said more than the situation required. I noticed those visits. I didn’t ask about them, because asking a dying man what he’s doing with his lawyer felt like a cruelty I wasn’t willing to commit. I wish now I had asked. It would have saved me some of the worst hours of that October.

Dad died on a Tuesday morning in early October, with Chris holding one of his hands and me holding the other, Beverly somewhere down the hall on the phone, we later learned, with a realtor about the house.

The funeral was four days later.

I need to walk you through that morning slowly, because every piece of it matters.

Beverly had taken over the planning almost entirely, which Chris and I allowed because grief makes you tired in a way that makes fighting over flower arrangements feel impossible. She chose a program with her own photograph on the back page, larger than the family photo of Dad with Mom and us as children. She asked the funeral director, in front of me, whether there was a way to seat her “immediately beside the casket, where the widow belongs,” which is a sentence I will never forget the exact wording of as long as I live. She gave a eulogy that mentioned my father’s “deep partnership” with her eleven times by my count, and mentioned Kathy, his wife of twenty years and the mother of his children, exactly zero.

Chris sat through all of it in his red suit, perfectly still, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past the podium.

I didn’t understand yet. I just thought he’d lost his mind with grief, the way people sometimes do, picking the wrong moment for the wrong kind of statement. I was embarrassed. I am not proud of that, but it’s true, and this story doesn’t work if I pretend otherwise.

The trouble came at the receiving line, after the service, while the funeral home staff were preparing to move everyone out to the cars for the drive to the cemetery.

Beverly came down the line in her severe black dress, accepting condolences with the practiced face of a woman performing exactly the right amount of grief for an audience, and when she reached Chris, something in her seemed to finally let go of whatever restraint she’d been holding all morning.

“You could not wear black for one day,” she said, not quietly. “One day, Chris. For your father. Instead you turn his funeral into a circus act, exactly like you turn everything into a circus act, and I am done pretending it isn’t an embarrassment to this family.”