DIED 2005
THE COMMON THEME OF the speeches at his funeral, which overflowed down the steps of a picture-book church in Maryland without a single blood relative in attendance, was: I cannot believe he lasted this long. His stepmother, who married his adoptive father when the deceased was just a teenager in prison, said, I never thought he’d be a good man. His stepbrother said, When I met him he was an asshole. His best friend recounted arguments that ran for decades.
His wife of sixteen years—my sister-in-law—sat silent in the first pew, still in shock. They rarely spent a night apart, but she’d been fast asleep at her sister’s when his heart clenched up. She could not have done a thing, the doctor said, but that’s what they always tell you. They know it will be hard enough in your little condo full of meticulously organized CDs, movies, baseball caps, and mystery novels shelved to the ceiling, keeping out chaos the way the Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado.
By the time I met him, his chaos days were long over, though his tongue was still sharp as a blade. He was a big bald paleface accountant who was the only other guest invited to his little brother’s fortieth-birthday party. He brought the steaks, I brought the coconut-tomatillo soup. He took one look at me and said I was The One, which was both embarrassing and impossibly endearing.
Within a few years he had turned from a fat guy into a skeleton, living on Kools and Pepsi and not taking his diabetes medicine. Driving up from Germantown to watch the Redskins with his little brother. Who buried him alone in the rocky ground of their mother’s farm. Three brothers buried the first, two brothers buried the second and also their father, now one brother buries the other and is alone. A dark summer and a terrible season for the Redskins lie ahead. He will dig his hole himself.