1945 – 2018
Seeing her last name was… weird. It hit me stronger than when I saw it on the end of my siblings’ names. I hadn’t seen it on my own since I had decided I didn’t want a reminder of it.
A few people seemed to be hanging around a doorway to the left of the portrait, and I watched them. They didn’t look familiar though.
Now or never, right?
I could do this. I was going to. Then when this was done, I was going back tomyhouse to see my sister, and then I’d have a job to go to the following day.
Breathing in through my nose, I told Rip, “We can go sit.”
He glanced down at me, at six four compared to my five seven, and nodded. We walked forward, him beside me the entire time, as we headed toward the opened doorway. The man and the woman standing there both gave us a serious nod as we went by them. The room was filled with row after row of pews with a raised dais-like area at the front, where a casket lay. Opened. Like I had expected from the parking lot, only the first three rows of pews were filled, and I couldn’t help but glance from the back of one head to another.
I stopped. With the back of my hand, I touched Ripley’s loosely hanging fingers and whispered, “I want to go say bye. If you just want to wait back here, I won’t be long.”
His whispered response wasn’t hesitant at all. “I’ll go.”
I raised my hand and rubbed at my brow bone with it, not because he wanted to go with me—that wasn’t it at all—but just because… that casket and the backs of those heads made me feel hesitant and bad at the same time.
I still nodded at Rip, not able to even muster up any kind of facial expression that told him I was okay. Because I wasn’t really feeling that okay. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t okay.
Ripley tipped his chin down at me, and it was that, that made me keep moving. We headed down the center aisle, where Rip walked to the side as I took a step up onto the raised area.
It was surreal, looking inside it, and it was more surreal—and honestly sad—to take it all in.
Thankfully, it was easy enough to ignore the gazes on the back of my head. Maybe I was imagining it, but I doubted it, and even then, I just couldn’t find it in me to care as I looked at a face that looked familiar but didn’t at the same time. It had been a long time.
A dozen thoughts went through my head, and I told my grandmother a few different things.
Thank you.
I hope you were okay.
Things worked out for me.
The girls are all doing great.
Lily is graduating at the top of her class.
They’re all going to be in college.
Leaving was the best thing I could have done.
I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you more.
It was only the sound of the doors being closed behind me that made me realize how long I had stood there gazing down at the woman with her eyes closed. The familiar but not familiar face. The first person who had taught me that doing the right thing wasn’t easy and would more than likely never be.
It was only then that I took a step back and gave my grandmother’s face a bittersweet smile before I eventually turned around and immediately spotted Ripley maybe four feet away, standing with his back to the wall…
With his gaze on the pews.
I knew what I was doing as I glanced in the direction of what he was focused on. Some part of me knew that chances were I might not like what I saw. But I did it anyway.
It was my luck that the first face I landed on was the last face I would have ever wanted to see sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Face blank. Pretending like I wasn’t even there.
My dad looked twenty years older than he had the last time I had seen him. Like my grandmother, he looked familiar but didn’t. He looked like hell.
A lot could happen in a decade, I guessed.
