Chapter 19 Chapter Nineteen
The church was fuller than I expected.
That was the first thing that got me. Walking through those doors with my mother's arm through mine and seeing how many people had come.
Some faces I half recognised and half that I didn't. The room was full of people who had known my father in chapters of his life that existed long before I was ever born.
His old foreman from the warehouse, a barrel-chested man named Douglas who shook my hand with both of his and couldn't get a single word out.
Three women from the church who had known Dad since he was seventeen took turns holding my mother's hands and crying quietly into tissues, leaving trays full of food on the table.
His brother Gerald from Atlanta was sitting very straight in the second row, glaring at everyone in the room with Dad's exact eyes in a face that was maybe ten years older, I hadn’t seen him since I was a child and he’d always given me the chills even back then.
There was something very, very off about him, so I could only look at him for a second at a time before I had to look somewhere else.
Mrs Martinez, our neighbour, sat in the front row with her hands folded, and her back straight, dressed like she was meeting someone important.
The Dawsons took a pew near the back. I didn't look directly at them, because I knew they were there.
I still wasn’t sure if they belonged here though, they were kind and courteous, but they did not know my father and….
I put the ungrateful thought out of my mind, greeted the people I had to greet and waited for the funeral service to start.
Mom and I sat in the front.
Reverend Cole spoke first. Then Raymond. Then two of Dad's oldest friends who between them told three stories I'd never heard before that made the whole room laugh through tears, and I sat there and took all of it and breathed slowly in and out and held my mother's hand and waited.
Then Reverend Cole looked at me.
"Mr Hartwell is succeeded by his only child and daughter, Lena. It is only right that she be asked to say a few words."
I stood up, and the walk to the front of the church was the longest of my life.
I had written something for the occasion.
It was three pages long, typed up and single-spaced, because that was how I did everything in my life, thoroughly and prepared and colour-coded if possible.
I’d worked on it carefully for two nights and timed it so that I knew exactly what I was going to say and when.
I stood at the podium and looked out at all the faces looking back at me and my mind went completely blank.
I looked down at my pages, then I folded them up and put them in my pocket.
"My dad," I started. My voice sounded smaller than I’d thought it would, but that was to be expected, considering the circumstances.
I cleared my throat. "My dad used to do the crossword puzzle every morning at the kitchen table. Every single morning, without fail. And he was terrible at it." A few people smiled.
"I mean genuinely, embarrassingly bad. He'd get three clues in and then start just making things up and writing them in anyway, totally confident, completely wrong." I heard someone laugh softly.
"And every morning I'd come downstairs and look over his shoulder and point out that a seven-letter word for navigational tool was not, in fact, the word spatula. And every morning he'd look up at me and say Lena, I think you'll find that spatula can mean many things in the right context."
The laughter was warmer this time, and people had started to relax.
I gripped the sides of the podium.
"He did that with everything in his life. He decided something was true and committed to it completely. He decided our street was the best street in the city. He decided our house was the most beautiful house he'd ever seen, peeling paint and all, and he decided I was going to change the world."
I paused to wipe a stray tear off my cheek,I didn't realise until that moment that I'd been crying. "And the thing about my dad was that when he decided something, when he said it out loud in that voice he had, you believed it. Even when it was objectively insane. Even when the evidence was pointing in the complete opposite direction."
I swallowed. "He made you believe things about yourself just by believing them first."
The church was very quiet.
"I've been trying to figure out what to say today for a while now. Trying to find the right words for who he was and what he meant and how it's possible that someone can just be gone when they were so completely, entirely present for every single day of your life."
I looked down for a moment. "I haven't found those words. I don't think they exist."
Mom was crying silently in the front pew. I kept my eyes just above her head.
"What I know is this. He never missed a morning. Not one. Every single day, kitchen table, terrible crossword, same spot, and he'd squeeze my shoulder when I came downstairs, everyone like clockwork."
My voice wavered, and I breathed out a shaky breath "I didn't know how much I was counting on that until it wasn't there anymore."
Silence.
"He was my father. He was the best man I've ever known. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to be someone he wouldve been proud of."
I looked out at the room one last time, at Mr Douglas with his head bowed, Mr Raymond with his hat in his hands.
At my mother, who had loved this man for over twenty years and was now sitting in the front row of his funeral holding herself together with everything she had.
"Thank you all for coming," I said. "He would have been so embarrassed by all of this. He would have said it was too much fuss." I almost smiled. "He would have been so happy."
I don't remember much of the graveside, but I remember the officiant, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he'd said.
I remembered also, that it was drizzling with rain in the middle of June, just like in the movies, as though the skies knew someone important had passed away and wanted to grieve too.
I took the first handful of dirt off the pile on the ground, opened my fingers and let it fall on the coffin.
I could not bear to look inside it, I refused to remember my father that way, as a corpse.
My mother followed next, throwing in a handful of dirt on the grave, before the caretakers began the actual burial, shovelling dirt into the hollow ground.
The grief I had been waiting for came just then, when I realised it was just me and the grave and the headstone that said, “In Loving Memory, Father, Husband, Son.”
One single thought that came through all that quiet.
For the first time in my life, my father had gone where I could not follow.
I had never had my heart break like I felt it break in that moment.
I wanted to rip it out of my chest so it would stop hurting, I wanted to cry and scream and beat the dirt and take it all back, turn back time to the last day I saw him and beg desperately for one last hug.
I was so stricken with grief that my legs gave out and I collapsed.
I fell, reaching for something that wasn't there to hold me up, and just as I was about to hit the ground, a strong arm came around my back, and a hand caught mine.
It took a second to steady myself, but eventually I looked up.
Jace was there, with no sunglasses now, his sharp, dark eyes now soft and gentle.
He looked down at me with an expression I didn't have a name for, with his hands around me as a solid and steady anchor.
And this time, he didn’t let me go.