“I know half of you want me out of here right now.”
Theo stopped. His voice had cracked on the last word.
For a moment, he just stood at the microphone in that red dress while people whispered behind me. The church was so full that some people were standing along the back wall. Every one of them was staring at him.
My husband, Daniel, was half-standing beside me. One hand on the pew in front of us. His jaw tight.
I had one hand wrapped around his sleeve. I wasn’t sure anymore whether I was holding him back or holding on.
Theo looked down at himself.
“And I know how this looks,” he said. “It isn’t even mine. I borrowed it from my sister.”
A few people shifted in their seats. Somebody coughed. An old man near the front shook his head slowly, the way you’d shake your head at a car accident.
Theo swallowed hard.
“The reason I’m standing here in it is very simple.”
He turned and looked at my son’s coffin.
“And it’s the saddest thing I know.”
The room went quiet.
And I want to tell you the truth about that moment, because the whole story depends on it. Ten minutes earlier, I had seriously considered asking the funeral director to take that boy outside.
My son Jack died seventeen days after his eighteenth birthday.
Cancer. A kind with a long name that I learned to spell without looking, the way you learn the name of a street you never wanted to live on.
Fourteen months from diagnosis to funeral.
It still feels obscene to reduce his whole life to those facts. They fit on an index card. He didn’t.
Jack loved old horror movies, the cheaper the better. The ones where you can see the zipper on the monster’s back.
He burned grilled cheese every single time because he refused to cook it on low heat. “Low heat is for cowards, Mom.” Then he’d scrape the black off with a butter knife over the sink and eat it anyway.
He hated tomatoes. But he put ketchup on everything. Eggs. Rice. Once, to my horror, a slice of pizza.
“Ketchup is made of tomatoes,” I told him.
“Ketchup is made of ketchup,” he said, like I was the one who didn’t make sense.
He could name almost every capital city in the world. Ouagadougou. Ulaanbaatar. Tegucigalpa. He’d rattle them off at dinner if you gave him a country. But he could not, for the life of him, remember to bring his laundry downstairs. His hamper would overflow until it looked like a small mountain of hoodies, and I’d stand in his doorway and say, “Burkina Faso,” and he’d say, “Ouagadougou,” and I’d say, “Laundry,” and he’d say, “I don’t know that one.”
And Theo had been beside him for most of it.
