by Kelly Rimmer
ents was making me nervous, too. I’d been with the family for
five weeks by that point, and I had to admit, the children had
grown on me. I just couldn’t bear the thought of them losing
Patrick. And that’s why I was standing in his doorway preparing
for battle, even as my muscles ached with exhaustion.
“I don’t want dinner,” Patrick grunted.
I sighed and pushed the door open. He was in bed lying on
his side, staring away from me. It felt strange to step into his
bedroom that night. I’d searched every cranny of it while he
was at work, but this was different. He was in there now, and I
felt I was crossing some invisible boundary. But this conversa-
tion had to start somewhere, and I couldn’t wait for Patrick to
find the energy to get out of bed, because I just didn’t know if
he ever would without a push.
“I talked to Mother today.”
He sighed heavily, then adjusted the blankets, pulling them
higher toward his chin.
“I don’t feel like talking about this now.”
“Well, you don’t have a choice,” I said impatiently. “Is this
really what you want?”
“Does it matter what I want?” he mumbled. I sighed and
walked to stand in front of him. His eyes had sunk into his head,
and his skin had taken on a gray pallor that frightened me. Pat-
rick hadn’t shaved in days, and the funeral was only twelve hours
away. I had intended to interrogate him about his plans for the
future but realized that it was going to be challenge enough to
get him out of bed.
“Look,” I said quietly. “Get up, take a shower and then come
and have some soup.”
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Kelly Rimmer
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, it’s not about you, Patrick. It’s never been about you,
but now more than ever. I know you are hurting, but if you
want to keep them—”
“How exactly do I keep them, Maryanne?” he asked, sitting
up at last. “Your father told me they’ve already spoken to a law-
yer. A single man raising four kids on his own? Even if I figured
out the logistics of childcare, if they take this to the courts, no
one is going to side with me.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t try, Patrick!”
“Your father paid the rent last month, but I haven’t worked
enough this month for the next payment. Plus, I’m already be-
hind with every other bill. I don’t even know what I’m doing with them! I can’t cook or clean and I don’t know where to start
with raising them. The kids will be better off in your parents’
damned house with nice things and good schools.”
“Those children just lost their mother,” I whispered fiercely.
“And if you stopped feeling sorry for yourself for more than five
seconds and actually listened to me, I’d tell you that you can offer
those kids something my parents don’t even have the capacity to
understand.” He paused then, and finally met my eyes. I pushed
on, emboldened. “My parents have more money than God, but
no heart at all. And the past few weeks I’ve had this feeling that
you…” I was frustrated by the tears that sprung to my eyes, and
I kicked the bed out of sheer impatience. “You miserable, pathetic
excuse for a man…despite all evidence to the contrary I just had
this feeling you could at least offer them love. But if you’re re-
ally going to let my parents take your children without so much
as a fight, then I guess I was right about you all along.”
I spun out of the room, and ignoring the sleeping children
in the next room, slammed the door behind me. I took a bath
and let myself cry for a while, because Grace and I had turned
out okay, but my parents had only hardened as the years went
on. The more I thought about it, the more determined I was
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that those four little urchins deserved better. Sometime over the
month I’d spent with them, they’d burrowed their way into my
heart, and the idea of my mother and father turning them into
proper little statues was just too awful to contemplate. I didn’t
want Timmy and Jeremy to grow up to think that they were
somehow better than the women in their life just by virtue of
their gender. I didn’t want Bethany and Ruth to grow up to
think that a woman’s only option was to stay at home. I tried
to console myself by remembering that I had come out of that
very environment and I’d seen the light, but I just kept think-
ing of Grace, and the life she fell into with Patrick, and how it
never seemed to occur to her that she could choose something
different for herself.
And I wasn’t at all sure why I had convinced myself that Pat-
rick was a better option for those kids than my parents, given the
things I knew about his marriage to my sister. But her words in
the car that final day just kept replaying in my mind.
One day he’s going to be a great man.
She had seen something in him, and perhaps I’d seen glimpses
of it, too, over those past weeks, when circumstances forced
Patrick to be vulnerable. I appreciated that he’d found it within
himself to apologize, even though he still believed I’d had an
abortion, and no doubt he still judged me for it. It took real
humility for him to thank me for my help, even though we’d
never gotten along.
Maybe he had the potential to become something better than
he had been, but I just couldn’t do this for him. If he didn’t even want to fight to keep his own children, then perhaps Grace had
been wrong about him all along.
My heart was heavy when I climbed out of the bath. I pulled
my nightgown on, intending to go right to my stretcher. But
when I stepped into the hallway and saw the light in the kitchen,
I followed it warily, and found Patrick at the table.
He was noisily slurping a bowl of the awful chicken soup
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Kelly Rimmer
I’d made him. Steam rose from the bowl, so I knew he’d even
heated it up for himself.
“Well?” he asked me, without turning around to face me.
“Are you going to join me?”
I entered the room hesitantly but didn’t sit at the table. In-
stead, I leaned against the countertop and crossed my arms over
my chest.
“I don’t want them to go,” he said, his tone flat. “It’ll kill me
if they do. But tell me what options I have here?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted heavily. “But there has to be a way.
Grace wouldn’t want you to give up without a fight.”
“Where do I even start?”
“Let’s bury her tomorrow. We’ll send her off and then we’ll
sit down and we’ll figure this out.”
“We? I thought you were going back to Californi
a any day
now. That’s what your father said, and that’s what I figured was
about to happen, too.”
I raised my chin stubbornly.
“I know you don’t like me, Patrick. I don’t like you much,
either. But we both loved Grace, and I think…” I cleared my
throat a few times, then admitted, “I think that maybe we both
love those filthy, noisy little monsters of yours.”
Patrick nodded, then exhaled.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Get some sleep,” I suggested. “Tomorrow’s going to be a
long day.”
Beth
1996
Logically, I had expected that losing Dad was going to hurt,
but I’m not at all prepared for the intensity of the grief. It crushes
me, catching me off guard every time I distract myself for even
a second. I stare at the TV for hours over the days that follow,
but I don’t absorb a word. I try unsuccessfully to go through the
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motions, but if Hunter wasn’t off work and there to remind me,
I’m not sure I’d eat at all, or bathe, or even feed Noah.
Walsh Homes shuts down on Monday for Dad’s memorial ser-
vice, and all of Ruth’s staff and many of their family members
come. There are people at the service who loved Dad simply
because he built their family home—crafting the space that be-
came their nest with such love and care that he earned a place
of honor in their lives forever. Almost all of the regulars at St
Louise’s Sunday Mass are there for the service, too, because Dad
never missed Mass, and this community was his family almost as
much as we were. Three retired priests make the journey back
from wherever they’ve landed in old age to pay their respects.
And when the time comes for the ceremony, a handful of Dad’s
golfing buddies and my brothers act as pall bearers.
Ruth, of course, has planned the service with militant pre-
cision. The four of us had lightly discussed it the day after Dad
passed, and we agreed it should be a celebration of his life. Maybe
that’s what she organized, but I’m not at all sure because now
that the time has come, I can’t focus much on the words or the
hymns or the prayers. I feel like I’m floating near my body,
completely dissociated from the proceedings, a ball of tangled
grief and loss and sadness. I don’t even realize I’m sobbing until
Chiara shifts along the pew, pushes Hunter out of the way and
throws her arms around me.
“Darling,” she chokes against my hair. “He loved you all, of
course, but you were the light of his life. He’s gone, but he’s
at peace now, and he’s left behind a legacy I know he was so
proud of.”
I turn to her then and I press my face into her shoulder. I sink
all the way into her embrace, and I feel for the very first time a
simple comfort in her presence. I don’t have the energy to won-
der about the dynamic in our relationship or to analyze how to
feel about her. All I can do is focus on the warmth of her arms
around me, and maybe it’s even that embrace that grounds me,
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Kelly Rimmer
because I make it through the rest of the Mass without dissolv-
ing into a puddle of pain.
We travel in procession to the cemetery for Rite of Com-
mittal. There are more prayers and more ceremony—the fu-
neral mass, the committal, then the wake. Despite my “lapsed”
Catholic status, tradition provides a roadmap, and that roadmap
unexpectedly offers me a path through the worst of the grief.
When Father Jenkins invites us to recite the Lord’s Prayer
as the graveside service concludes, I do so by rote, and I look
around to my family as they pray. Everyone is in tears—Ruth
and Tim and Jeremy unashamedly crying, too, now. When the
prayer finishes, and Dad’s casket is lowered into the ground, the
four of us look to one another.
It’s just us now, our gazes say.
We understand because we’ll miss him, too, their red-rimmed eyes tell me.
We’re going to be okay because we’ve still got one another, our common grief promises me.
And when the service ends, we gravitate to each other. There’s
more tears and hugs, but I feel the heaviest part of the grief lift
just a little, and I mentally check back into the day.
This, I realize, is why we have ceremonies like funerals—not
for the departed but for the living, to remind one another that
even in grief, we don’t have to be alone.
Ruth booked out a local function center for the wake, given
the size of the crowd we were expecting. There’s great food on
offer and plenty of booze, and over the hours the people who
loved him enthusiastically swap stories of Dad’s life.
I find myself laughing at the antics his long-term staff mem-
bers recount—about when he was first starting out on his own
and desperate to save every penny, how he’d recycle even bent
nails if he thought he could find a use for them. About the time
he was building a house for a family, and right in the middle
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of the project the mother was diagnosed with cancer, and how
Dad finished out the job for them without charging a cent for
labor. About the day one young apprentice tried to hang a cal-
endar with half-naked women on it in the workshop, and Dad
set the thing on fire and gave the whole staff a lecture about
respect for women.
I cry with Janet, who was Dad’s secretary for two decades. I
cry with Yuri, one of his best foremen. His golf buddies regale
me and my brothers with unlikely tales about holes in one. We
laugh about the “wild weekends” they’d plan; nights that would
inevitably end with them all in bed early because Dad was noth-
ing like a night owl, but he was also the life of the party. He’d
turn in at eight or nine, and everyone else would get bored and
soon turn in, too. His neighbors remind me about how until he
got sick, Dad always helped them with their yard work when-
ever life or health or family got in the way of it. Hunter’s boss
reminds me about that commissioned artwork on the wall of
his office—and how customers and guests visiting still often remark at the sheer beauty of the thing.
My dad lived a big life and it was an important life, a life
devoted to family and friends and his church and community.
And when all is said and done, that is who he was, and that’s
the legacy he left behind. It’s enough for now for me to focus
on that, and to put aside my confusion about his early years, and
to grieve the man I knew him to be.
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17
Maryanne
1959
all for Grace’s sake, because when Patrick and I piled out of the
car with the children for the funeral service, they both came
to help us take our seats in the cathedral. For once in my life I
didn’t have it in me to make a scene.
Her funeral service was excruciatingly long because Father
insisted that the priest send her off with the full Requiem Mass.
I distracted the children with candy, and I was proud of them
for patiently sitting around me, especially Beth. She seemed to
understand that something momentous was happening, even if
she couldn’t really fathom what it was.
And then we all piled into Patrick’s car, and drove to the
cemetery. There wasn’t so much as a breeze that day, and there
wasn’t a cloud in the sky. As we drove in near silence, I thought
about how such an awful occasion shouldn’t be allowed to take
place on such a beautiful day. But life has no rhyme or reason
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sometimes, and when it all boils down, we really are at the
mercy of fate.
There was quite a crowd around that gravesite, mostly Mother
and Father’s friends and executives from the bank who prob-
ably didn’t know Grace well enough to care, but they certainly
knew Father well enough to make the trip. Patrick’s aunt Nina
was there, and she held herself up against her walker beside the
children. Mr. and Mrs. Hills were there, too, and Ewan stood
within the circle of a small collection of people I vaguely rec-
ognized as Patrick’s colleagues.
It was all dreadfully sad, and as they lowered my sister into
the ground, I wondered how on earth I was supposed to carry
on with my life knowing the role I’d played in her death. My
guilt came and went in waves—some days I’d feel certain that
it was all my fault, and if I’d just found some other option for
her or refused to help her, things would have been okay. Other
days I convinced myself that one way or another, Grace was
going to end her pregnancy, and it was hardly my fault there
were no safe alternatives There at her graveside the day of her
funeral, I felt for the very first time a balancing in those two
extremes.
Grace was gone, and I’d certainly played a role in that. But
I was only helping her to do what she felt she so desperately
