The End of the World as We Know It Read Free

hated my father, but I agreed with all of them anyway, because that’s what you do, as well. Anyway, what good would it have done to say it now?
    I had thought I would jump for joy when my father died. I had thought the weight of the world would be lifted from my shoulders. Instead, I was overwhelmed with grief, as was my sister, who had genuinely loved him and taken care of him in every way, no matter how creepy he was.
    By one o’clock, most of the people, the people who weren’t as close to my father as some of the other people, had left, and the minister came, carrying with him the box with my father’s ashes in it. He changed into his vestments in the room off the sittingroom and then we were ready for the burial part. The ashes to ashes part.
    Somehow the family squeezed into the little space inside the box bushes, and the other people stood on the terrace and looked down at us, the children standing on the wall in their bathing suits, rapt with curiosity—the family group, the minister in his cassock and cotta and his stole, holding the gray box that looked basically like a piece of Tupperware.
    The minister read the service, which is very short, and he named both my father and my mother, and I could feel my aunt’s exhalation of relief and regret for her sister, and then he turned and handed the box to me.
    It was surprisingly heavy. I had expected it to be light as the ashes you clean out of the fireplace, light like artificial whipped cream, but it wasn’t. I could see bits of bone through the milky plastic. This was my father in my hands. This was the final sum of my history with my father, and I felt the weight, not just of the box, but of the past, the weight of the anger, the weight of the disaster of our relationship. I had thought I had forgiven him.
    I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the box, and then I realized I was supposed to put it into the hole I had dug that morning. I knelt down and put the box in the hole. I looked up and saw the stares on the faces of my father’s friends, the children craning to get a better view, and I realized it wasn’t over.
    I began to shove the dirt in the hole with my hands. I felt like crying, but I knew that would just be a mess, and anyway, it was like planting something, and I had planted things a milliontimes. My sister, bless her heart, knelt down beside me, and with her beautiful slender hands, she shoved dirt as well, watching it fall and cover this man she had loved. This man whose toenails she had clipped, whose hair she had cut.
    When it was finished and the last of the dirt was mounded over the box in which my father’s ashes would lie forever, I took my sister’s hand and we stood up. The people on the porch were still staring, and the minister waited patiently to say his blessing. So I turned and stamped down the dirt with my feet, and then I picked up the marble slab and the heavy statue and placed them over the freshly dug hole. Then the minister said the final blessing, the Lord bless us and keep us, the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance and give us peace, both now and forever.
    I always tell men who grieve for their fathers that it never turns out to be what you expected. I tell them that, no matter how much you think about it, no matter how deeply you’ve decided in advance that you know how you will feel when your father dies, the reality is far deeper and stranger than you can imagine.
    I always tell people that if you want closure, as people say now, if you want some finality, you should get up at six o’clock in the morning and dig your father’s grave. You should shove the dirt over him with your own hands and stamp it down with your English shoes.
    But it’s not true. It’s not true, the thing I tell people about digging the grave and stamping down the dirt.
    I had thought the demons would be laid to