I

11

t hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a
hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth.
Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You
look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a
playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely
this way.

The day after my father died, we drove to a South Side funeral parlor—me,
my mother, and Craig—to pick out a casket and plan a service. To make
arrangements, as they say in funeral parlors. I don’t remember much about our visit
there, except for how stunned we were, each of us bricked inside our private
grief. Still, as we went through the obscene ritual of shopping for the right box in
which to bury our dad, Craig and I managed to have our first and only fight as
adult siblings.

It boiled down to this: I wanted to buy the fanciest, most expensive casket
in the place, complete with every extra handle and cushion a casket could
possibly have. I had no particular rationale for wanting this. It was something to
do when there was nothing else to do. The practical, pragmatic part of our
upbringing wouldn’t allow me to put much stock in the gentle, well-intentioned
platitudes people would heap on us a few days later at the funeral. I couldn’t be
easily comforted by the suggestion that my dad had gone to a better place or was
sitting with angels. As I saw it, he just deserved a nice casket.

Craig, meanwhile, insisted that Dad would want something basic—modest
and practical and nothing more. It suited our father’s personality, he said.
Anything else would be too showy.