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SEVENTY

the day of the funeral

I was sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, making notes on the latest draft of the eulogy I would be giving for my husband.

It was bullshit. But it was exactly what my audience wanted to hear.

For them, we were Heartstone royalty. A modern-day fairy tale. Smart. Attractive. Successful. The perfect couple. What they didn’t know was that individually we were damaged goods, each in our own way dealing with the pain of abandonment.

Alex had been unwanted and unloved since birth. Growing up he never felt that his newfound parents adopted him for who he was. He was convinced that he was merely a convenient surrogate for two desperate people who were forever grieving the loss of the only son they ever really loved.

And then I came along and gave him what he’d been searching for. I loved him with all my heart. I was all he needed.

But I had my own issues. I, too, had been abandoned. First by my mother, and then in a two-minute phone call from Korea that left me broken and alone. From that day forward my sexual behavior became erratic, rarely based on sound judgment or informed choices. I was a textbook case of the girl looking for love in all the wrong places.

In hindsight, we should never have gotten married. Alex needed stability, security, unwavering devotion, and most of all, fidelity. And I was the teenage tramp who grew up to become the wayward wife.

Most husbands who catch their wives cheating want out. Alex wanted retribution. Divorce wasn’t good enough. For Alex the only punishment for adultery was biblical.

But of course, not a word of that would ever be uttered. Instead, I would sing the praises of Alex Dunn—tireless physician, dedicated public servant, loving husband, adoring father.

Like I said, pure bullshit.

“Mom?”

I looked up. My son was standing in the doorway. My heart smiled. Kevin was more man than boy now. I wanted to tell him he looked every bit as handsome as his father, but, of course, I knew better than to spark his insecurities with high praise.

I kicked it down a notch. “Thanks for wearing a tie. Dad would like that.”

I stood up and gave him a hug. He smelled of weed, but I didn’t comment on that either. So much for sending my sister Lizzie to supervise the kids.

“The circus is in town,” he said.

I have yet to master teen speak. “What circus?”

“The one that’s following us to Dad’s funeral. Cop cars, fire trucks, motorcycles, and a shitload of paparazzi. Why do they have to stalk us like that all the time?”

“I know how you feel, but today is not about us , Kevin. This is about Dad. He was a revered member of this community. People are grief-stricken by his loss,” I said, parroting some of the hokum that would soon flow trippingly from my tongue to a packed house at St. Cecelia’s.

“Mom, I know. But why are we having a funeral ? There’s no body.”

“Sweetie, you don’t need a body to have a funeral. It’s a ceremony to honor the dead.”

“Dad’s not dead. He’s missing.”

“Excellent point,” I said. “I stand corrected. A funeral is a ceremony to honor the departed.”

“But, Mom...”

“No buts, Kev. He may not be dead, but you can’t tell me he’s not departed.”

“Fine. You win. Again.” An impish grin spread across his face the way it does every time he wants to make me laugh. “You realize, of course, that if I marry a lawyer, I stand a good chance of living out my entire life without ever winning an argument.”

He got the laugh. And it was genuine.

“Kevin, you have to remember that we’re not the only ones who are losing Dad. He had hundreds of friends, coworkers, and patients he helped over the years. This funeral will give them a chance to say goodbye as well.”

He looked over at the pile of papers on the table. “Are you still writing the eulogy?”

“Rewriting, editing, tweaking, second-guessing. You know me. I want it to be perfect.”

“When did you start writing it?”

“A couple of days ago.”

He looked surprised. “Really? Even though it’s been two weeks.”

It referred to the night the police went from search and rescue to looking for Alex’s body.

“Two weeks ago, I was still hoping for a miracle. I decided it would be bad juju to even think about a eulogy. So, I waited another ten days. I finally went to see Father Connelly, and he suggested that a funeral Mass would at least give us a sense of closure. So, I didn’t start writing till a few days ago.”

“If I tell you something about Katie, will you promise not to yell at her? Otherwise, she’ll know I told you, and she’ll come up with new ways to torture me.”

Kevin and I had a running deal. He loved to rat on his sister, but only if I promised not to give him up.

“My lips are sealed,” I said. “What did she do this time?”

“She hacked into Dad’s computer and read the eulogy he wrote for you.”

I’m a lawyer and a politician. I’m well trained in the art of never letting the other guy know how clueless you are.

“Really?” I said, pulling out my go-to neutral response.

“Did you ever read it?” Kevin asked.

Read it? I had no idea he even wrote it.

“Of course I didn’t read it,” I said. “Unlike your sister, I respect boundaries.” My voice was calm, but inside I was seething.

“I don’t get it,” Kevin said. “You waited a long time after Dad was... after he was departed... before you wrote his eulogy. Why would he write one for you while you were still alive?”

Because that was typical Alex. So cocksure of himself that he wrote his acceptance speech before he even shot the movie.

But my son didn’t need to hear the bitter truth. He needed something that would reinforce the image of the perfect father, the committed doctor who pledged to “first do no harm.”

“You never met my mother,” I said, spinning the yarn as I spoke.

“Grandma Kate,” he said.

I smiled. “She’d have loved hearing you call her that. She was only forty-one when she died. The disease that took her is very rare, but it’s hereditary. Which means Aunt Lizzie and I are at greater risk than most people. Even though your dad dealt with life and death every day, one night he confessed to me that he was afraid that if I died young—emphasis on the if , Kevin—he’d be too devastated to gather his thoughts and write a proper eulogy. So I jokingly said, ‘Write it now while you still worship the ground I walk on.’”

“Good one,” Kevin said, always happy to let me know when my mom humor meets with his approval.

“Anyway, he took me up on it. But I would never think of reading it in advance. I told him I wanted to be surprised at my funeral.”

I reached out and gave him a fleeting suitable-for-self-conscious-teenagers hug. “Speaking of funerals, we should get out there and join the circus. Go get Aunt Lizzie and Katie and save me a seat in the limo.”

He left, and I gathered up the pages of my eulogy from the table.

The words that had once been true were now hollow.

How do you go from loving a man with all your heart to feeling relieved by his death, I wondered.

How do you decide that your children will be safer, live longer, if their father is gone forever?

How do you think the unthinkable? Do the undoable?

I did what I’ve been doing all my life. I gathered the facts, weighed all the options until I was down to one, then I braced myself for the consequences.

I didn’t kill Alex. But that afternoon at the rock quarry when Johnny said those four words—do you trust me—I could have stopped it from happening.

And I had made a calculated decision not to.