The Red Suit At Dad’s Funeral
“My father left something for today,” Chris said, to maybe sixty people now turning to look at him. “I think he’d want you all to hear it, since most of you were just asked to believe I ruined his funeral on purpose.”
He pressed play.
Our father’s voice came out of that tiny speaker thin and tired, recorded in the final weeks of his life, but unmistakably his, the same voice that used to call out closing time from behind the hardware store register every evening of my childhood.
“If you’re hearing this,” Dad’s recorded voice said, “it means somebody in my family decided today was the day to tell my son who he’s allowed to be. I want to say, for anyone who’s forgotten, that my son spends his life making dying children laugh in a hospital that smells like bleach and fear, wearing the exact color his mother asked me, on the last good day she had, to make sure somebody in this family kept wearing after she was gone. I couldn’t do it myself. I tried. Grief made a gray man out of me and I let it. My son did what I couldn’t. He turned grief into something that helps other people instead of something that just sits in a man’s chest for thirty years.”
A woman near the chapel doors had started crying. I could hear it, a small broken sound, though I didn’t look away from Chris long enough to see who it was.
“Beverly,” Dad’s voice went on, “if you’re the one standing there right now making my boy feel small, I want you to know I heard every word you ever said about him when you thought I was in the other room. I heard you tell him to get a real job. I heard you call his work an embarrassment to a woman at the salon. I heard you tell my lawyer, more than once, that the store should be sold and the money split in a way that left my children out of their own father’s life’s work, and I want you to hear me say, clearly, in front of whoever is standing in that parking lot right now, that none of that is happening. The store belongs to Michelle and Chris. It has since the week I got my diagnosis. The house is yours to live in for one year, as we agreed before we married, and not one day longer, and I think you know exactly which agreement I’m talking about, because you signed it yourself five years ago in Barry’s office. I am not interested in punishing you for who you turned out to be. I married you hoping for something different, and some of what we had was real, I believe that. But I will not let my last word on this earth be silence while you make my son feel small for loving his mother out loud. Chris, if you’re the one holding this, I want you to know I am prouder of that red suit than any plaque this town ever gave me for the store. Your mother would be standing on this wall with you if she could. Wear it every year. For both of us.”