L

We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director
pretended not to listen and our mother just stared at us implacably, through the
fog of her own pain.

We were yelling for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual
argument. Neither of us was invested in the outcome. In the end, we’d bury our
dad in a compromise casket—nothing too fancy, nothing too plain—and never
once discuss it again. We were having an absurd and inappropriate argument
because in the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and
inappropriate.

Later, we drove Mom back to Euclid Avenue. The three of us sat downstairs
at the kitchen table, spent and sullen now, our misery provoked all over again by
the sight of the fourth empty chair. Soon, we were weeping. We sat for what felt
like a long time, blubbering until we were exhausted and out of tears. My
mother, who hadn’t said much all day, finally offered a comment.

“Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully.
And yet there was a touch of lightness in how she said it. She was pointing
out that we Robinsons had been reduced to a true and ridiculous mess—
unrecognizable with our swollen eyelids and dripping noses, our hurt and strange
helplessness here in our own kitchen. Who were we? Didn’t we know? Hadn’t
he shown us? She was calling us back from our loneliness with three blunt words,
as only our mom could do.

Mom looked at me and I looked at Craig, and suddenly the moment seemed
a little funny. The first chuckle, we knew, would normally have come from that
empty chair. Slowly, we started to titter and crack up, collapsing finally into full-
blown fits of laughter. I realize that might seem strange, but we were so much
better at this than we were at crying. The point was he would have liked it, and
so we let ourselves laugh.

osing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and
ponder how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he died.
Suzanne had been twenty-six. The lesson there was simple: Life is short and not
to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of
legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain
that I had something more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.