I had already said good-bye for two years. Each time I wrote a card telling him how much I loved him, I was saying good-bye; and when I went, on every vacation, down there and tried to make conversation while he sat in a recliner, dully watching TV, I was saying good-bye too.

So, when we finally lost him, it was no surprise. My mother had told all the staff at the nursing home that they were to take no heroic measures. Irreparable damage, in cases of cardiac arrest, occurs in three to five minutes. The brain, deprived of oxygen, cannot sustain all of its cells; and such a large number of them perish that never again can there be a real, functioning human being. You can bring someone back—but what you have restored is a non-person, a shell. Against the indignity of this sort of restoration, both my parents had made out a Living Will. When my stepdad’s final attack came, however, he was not at the nursing home but in the room adjoining my mother’s kitchen. Mother went to summon him for lunch and found him stretched on the spare bed, dying. For at least the next 10 minutes she was hysterical, screaming into the phone, trying to get help. Even though the man was 84 years old and had lived a good life. Even though he didn’t want to end up as a vegetable. Though he had a Living Will saying no heroic measures and so did she.

It has been remarked that the most appropriate metaphor for life in the 20th century is neither tragedy nor comedy but a blend of these two: tragicomedy. Confronted with the necessity of planning for a funeral, one is aware of this. The ways in which the aggrieved are comforted and cajoled approach the ludicrous more often than anyone who has not been there might anticipate. My brother, though he had been notified later than I, managed to get to Texas before I did; and so the task of accompanying my mother to the funeral home to make arrangements fell to him.

Cremation simplifies the problem of laying the dead to rest, but Orthodox Jewish law forbids cremation. Instead, the Chevra Kadisha, people who have volunteered for this task, wash the body to prepare it for burial. After they have finished their job, the body is considered clean and no one may touch it again. Burial is without embalming and takes place quickly. My parents did not belong to an Orthodox Jewish congregation. They were members of the Reform movement, which has somewhat more liberal tenets; so there were no Chevra Kadisha. Nonetheless, the first surprise at the funeral home was finding out that my stepfather had already been embalmed. It was too late to protest, so the cost of embalming went down on the bill.

In the Casket Selection Room, my brother asked to see a plain pine box. Believing that funerals ought not be occasions for ostentation, he wished also to adhere to traditional Jewish instruction on the kind of casket to be used for burial. The plain pine box was hideous. Made of the rawest kind of unfinished pine, it was lined with what resembled gray mouse fur. Funerals ought not be occasions for shame either. My mother and brother decided on the fancy pine box, heavily lacquered to a high polish, its wood a deep burnished golden tone, its handles heavy silver. That went down on the bill next.

What the casket finally selected looked like inside I never found out. The evening before the funeral, my mother asked me to take her to the funeral home to view the body. I was surprised, for I had no desire to see my stepdad dead. I drove my mother over but waited outside the room where he lay while she went in alone. Suffering every kind of guilt but unable to go with her, I sat on a salmon silk French provincial couch, trying to say something appropriate to the funeral parlor attendant, who was trying to say something appropriate to me. The only thing I could think of was, “Nice place you got here.” The attendant wasn’t doing much better. Funeral parlor attendants don’t smile or make jokes. They stand while you are sitting, and they shuffle their feet.

After a little while, my mother came out. She was smiling. “He looks SO good,” she said. They had wanted to put Jesse in his best suit, his best shoes and tie. My brother, the pragmatist, had argued. “Why does he have to wear his best clothes?” he had said. “We’re not going to have an open casket at the funeral. Why can’t he be buried naked? Someone else could enjoy having the clothes.” “It has, on occasion, happened that pallbearers have dropped a coffin,” the funeral director advised. “Should that occur, the casket could pop open and the body roll out.” A good idea, Jesse going naked to his maker. A bad one, Jesse rolling naked before the eyes of a hundred funeral guests. My brother got an idea. He brought down my stepdad’s best pajamas, robe, and slippers. These seemed natural. My stepdad, after all, had often appeared in these during the last several years of his life—feeble but well-groomed and looking, if a bit less dapper than in his uniform as a Captain in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps (seen by us only in pictures), at least quite presentable. And so, it was in this evening garb that my mother had viewed him. Hearing her repeat, “He looks SO good,” I suddenly realized why she had insisted on the trip to the funeral home to see him again. She was checking him out, as she had always done while he was alive— making sure his mustache was clipped and his hair smoothly combed, taking a last look at his clothes to be certain they were straight and didn’t have any little specks of lint on them—so that he would look nice wherever he was going. Now that he was going for good, it had been important to her to check him out for the last time.

I can’t remember driving to his funeral, though I know we had told the people at the funeral parlor not to send the limousine and I must have gotten there some other way. That morning, people started coming to the house at 8:30. We were trying to get dressed with the doorbell ringing or the phone demanding our attention every few minutes. At the funeral parlor, I kissed people I never saw except at funerals or weddings. I kissed people I had never kissed before. I invited a cousin to come have supper with us six times, and she explained to me six times why she couldn’t. Then it was time for the service, and we sat down behind a curtain and the curtain was suddenly whisked open and I saw the casket for the first time and so did my daughter, who began to shake. I had to hold her hand to keep her steady. My brother was on the other side, with his arm around my mother. The rabbi did a good job, putting in the important things, the things I wanted there. He told the story about Jesse and the farm couple. That was one I had discovered. I asked him once what fee he got for delivering a baby in the old days. He thought for a while. Then he said that the first baby he ever delivered was two babies, twins. They were born in a farmhouse. He hadn’t collected a fee. He had $7 and some small change in his pocket, so he left that on the farmhouse table. My stepdad was Mister Magoo, going through life blind. He got taken by mechanics who found unbelievable defects in his automobile engine. He threw money into dry holes near East Texas oil fields because he liked the promoters who were promoting. But he never knew he was being taken, so none of it counted. Sitting in a rowboat, a fishing line in his hand, sweating like a hog under a 110-degree-Texas sun in the middle of a lake swarming with flies, he was a happy man.

At graveside I laid my cheek on his coffin for a moment. It was smooth and cool. My brother came up beside me and whispered that the reason for laying the coffin down east to west was that, at the end of time when the last trumpet sounds, the dead are supposed to rise up in bodily form and head for Jerusalem. If their feet are turned toward the East, they can rise up and go in the right direction without turning. Perhaps my brother was telling me a folk tale. Surely if the dead can rise up incarnate, they can also manage a 180- degree pivot! Does it always rain at funerals? I have been to only two, but both times it rained. My stepdad had a few vanities. He had wanted a 21-gun salute, and he was entitled to it; but my mother felt it would be too showy. In the middle of the Hebrew intonation, there was a loud clap of thunder. My brother looked at me suddenly, smiling. The Old Lion got his roar after all. My brother stayed to throw a little dirt on the coffin. We had paid extra to have the hole in the ground lined with cement to avoid having to put more dirt on the grave later. When decay begins, a coffin sinks, leaving a depression in the ground above it—a process that goes on for some time unless you have guarded against it by resting the coffin on concrete. What we paid for concrete would have bought a lot of dirt. But we buried my stepdad in level ground.

Later we found out he could have been buried with a flag. Every veteran is entitled to one, even if he hasn’t been killed in action. We got the flag anyway and gave it to the rabbi for the next veteran. It is very large, big enough to cover a plain pine box, sturdy enough to go into the ground and stay there, not too ostentatious and not shameful.

I do not know where my stepdad is now. I didn’t notice where the limousine was going from the funeral home, so I’m not sure I could find his grave again. He was no kin of mine, this kind man who married my mother and took care of me and not only paid the bills when I arrived penniless with the three children from my own failed marriage but even brought me presents to cheer me up. No blood of his runs, or ever did run, in my veins. Still, I will say Kaddish for him.

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