Chapter 3 #2
We lift Edwin into the coffin together—Thaddeus at the shoulders, me at the feet, and one of the prospects supporting the middle.
We do it carefully. We do it slowly. Sage cries softly in the doorway and her mother holds her.
The other men in the room stand, hats off, in the kind of silence that is older than language.
Thaddeus arranges Edwin in the coffin the way you arrange a sleeping child in a crib. The flannel collar. The hands. The small leaf in the palm. He steps back. He nods at me.
I step forward.
I do what I have learned to do at the end of every death I attend—I lean down, and I kiss Edwin's forehead, and I whisper, very quietly, Go well.
It is not a religious gesture. It is something I made for myself, years ago, when I realized that hospice work needed a closing ritual or it would consume me.
I step back.
Sage steps forward. She kisses her grandfather's forehead. She tucks a small folded piece of paper into the breast pocket of his flannel. She steps back.
Edwin's daughter arrives. She has been driving from Lexington for three hours and she made it within thirty minutes of the body being placed in the box.
She does not wail. She kneels by the coffin and lays her cheek against her father's chest and she stays there for a long time, and no one disturbs her, and Thaddeus stands in the corner of the room with his hands folded and his head slightly bowed, and I have never, in any setting, seen a man hold space the way he holds it now.
When she rises, Thaddeus closes the lid.
He does not seal it. The lid sits on. The body is not gone yet; the funeral is tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning there will be one more chance for goodbyes before the lid is fastened. But the body is in the box, and the box is closed, and a corner of the room has been crossed.
The vigil begins.
I leave a little before midnight. Thaddeus stays.
He always stays through the vigil, Della tells me later.
He sits beside the coffin all night, the entire night, with no chair and no break, and he does this for every coffin he builds.
He calls it holding the box. The pack thinks of it as a duty.
I, having watched him do it for three hours before I left, think of it as a vow.
The burial is in the morning.
The pack gathers in the cemetery. The day is bright and cold.
Frost still on the grass at eight in the morning.
Conrad—I have seen him only twice before, the president, a broad-shouldered man in his fifties with iron eyes—gives the brief, plain remarks the pack uses.
A wolf named Gallows speaks the older rites in a low voice that I do not entirely understand the language of.
The coffin is lowered. The prospects shovel the first earth, and then the family takes turns, and then the rest of the pack passes the shovel from hand to hand in a long quiet procession that goes on for a long time.
I do not shovel. I am not pack. I stand at the graveside with Sage's hand in mine—she has reached for me without asking and I have let her—and I watch the white oak coffin disappear under the dark mountain soil one shovelful at a time.
Edwin is gone.
The pack disperses slowly. Della takes Sage and her family back down for the wake at the main hall. Conrad nods at me as he passes. Jo squeezes my shoulder. The cemetery empties.
I do not leave.
Thaddeus does not leave either. He is at the head of the grave with a shovel of his own, finishing the last of the work that the others left for him.
He shovels with the same unhurried rhythm he uses for everything.
The pile of earth diminishes. The grave fills.
By the time he is done, the sun has moved past the cemetery and a thin layer of cloud has come up from the south.
He plants the headstone.
He has carved it himself, of course. White oak. Edwin's name. The dates. And beneath the dates, in smaller script: HE LOVED HIS WIFE WELL.
I do not cry until I see the line.
Then I cry.
I cry quietly, the way I cried beside my mother's bed when I was twelve, the way I cried after Alma Birch and patient #246 and the prospect with sepsis who lived and the elderly man with COPD who did not.
I cry the way a hospice nurse cries, which is to say, without breaking my own carefulness, but completely.
Thaddeus sets down the shovel.
He comes to me.
He does not say anything. He does not need to. He stands beside me at the graveside in the thin afternoon light, and he puts his hand at the small of my back—a small light pressure, no weight, just contact—and he lets me cry.
When I am done, I take a long breath.
I say, "Do you ever get tired of it?"
He considers the question. He does not answer immediately. He never answers immediately, and I am learning that this is one of the most valuable things about him.
"Of the death?" he says.
"Of the death."
"No."
I look at him.
"I get tired of the in-between," he says.
"The waiting. The not-knowing-when. The way a family lives in the corridor of a hospital for weeks because the body keeps almost-ending and then not-ending.
That part is exhausting. The death itself—the moment of it, the work after it—is honest. It is the only honest moment in the whole arrangement. "
I close my eyes.
"That's exactly how I feel," I say.
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've been watching you for a month."
I open my eyes.
He is looking at me with the calm steady attention I have come to associate with the most dangerous thing about him, which is the way he sees things. Not what is on the surface. What is beneath.
"I'm sorry about Edwin," he says.
"He had a good death."
"He did. Because of you."
"Because of both of us."
He inclines his head.
I do not know what time we walk down the hill together. Late afternoon. The light low. The cemetery quiet behind us. We do not speak. We do not need to. At the foot of the hill, where the path splits—the workshop path going up, the cottage path going down—we stop.
He says, "Rue."
"Yes."
"Come up later. If you want."
"For what?"
"For nothing. To sit. The workshop is warm. I'll make tea."
I look at him.