I wore my best black suit for Finn’s service. The suit had seen far too many funerals over the years, but it did its job without complaining too much. When you reach my age, the endless succession of funerals becomes a blur. The only thing that ever changes is the name on the program.
There wasn’t a cloud in the afternoon sky for the graveside service. A real crop duster of a thunderstorm had come through overnight. The air was still sticky, but it had cooled down a few degrees. It was baseball weather. A perfect day to sit by the lake and sip a virgin piña colada and really enjoy my semiretirement. Invite the family over. Fire up the George Foreman.
Instead, I was at the Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery. Jill had her Friday summer class, so I was flying solo. She’d dropped me off and would pick me up on her way back home.
Besides Finn’s daughter, there wasn’t another familiar face among the two dozen mourners. I didn’t recognize anyone from the years I’d spent riding the train. Not that you’d expect commuters to come out for a conductor’s funeral. Not these days.
I took a seat in the very last row. This was about Finn, not former vice president Joe Biden.
The priest listed in the program was Father O’Hara. I’d met him once. Years ago. He’d been a young man then, and I suppose I had been too. The priest making his way to the head of the crowd was noticeably grayer. He walked with a slow gait, almost as if he carried some great burden on his back. It was difficult to believe he was the same man. As he took the podium, he nodded at me with recognition.
After Father O’Hara’s opening remarks, Finn’s sister delivered a short eulogy. A train rumbled past on the elevated tracks outside the cemetery. Not loud enough to drown her out, but distracting. It might have even been the same train that took Finn’s life. Everyone else had to be thinking the same thing. Finn’s sister sped up her delivery, plowing through her tears like they were nothing but light drizzle.
Father O’Hara retook the podium. As he ran through his rehearsed lines—the Corinthians, the Psalms, the verses I recognized from too many other funerals—my attention waned. Father O’Hara wasn’t known for his brevity of wit (nor his brevity, nor his wit). My eyes drifted to the nearest gravestones, searching for familiar names. Senator Richard Bassett, signer of the U.S. Constitution, was buried in the cemetery somewhere. So were a handful of other Delaware dignitaries from centuries past. War heroes, governors. Congressmen. Their weathered tombstones jutted at odd angles from the damp ground, making the cemetery look like a crooked smile filled with busted teeth. Despite its pedigree, the aging cemetery wasn’t the proper burial place for a proud man like Finn. With its overgrown weeds and rusted gates, it wasn’t the proper burial place for anyone anymore.
When a cemetery dies, where do you bury it?
After the service, I waited for the crowd to thin before approaching Finn’s daughter. We’d never met in person, but I felt like I’d known her forever. Finn wasn’t a storyteller, but he loved to show off photos of his family. The pictures did the talking for him. I’d watched Grace grow up through the years—from the hospital to kindergarten and finally high school graduation—all through the lens of a devoted father. Finn’s wallet eventually became so thick with photos of his wife and daughter that he couldn’t sit down on the damn thing.
Grace sported the same curly red hair I remembered from her high school photos. And the same toothy grin. The ivy tattoo peeking out of the neck of her pilgrim dress was new. Even though she’d done some growing up, she was still too young to be an orphan, with her father taken too soon and her mother all but gone.
As I approached, she whispered something to her aunt, who stepped aside to give us space. A motorcycle roared to life and tore out of the parking lot. It was loud enough to wake the dead, though the dead didn’t seem to mind.
I reached out a hand to shake Grace’s. “I was a friend of your father’s,” I said. Before I could say any more, she fell into my arms. I patted her back as she sobbed into my chest. “It’s okay,” I said, over and over. “It’s okay.”
Eventually, we broke apart. She wiped her eyes with a black handkerchief.
“How you holding up, kiddo?” I asked.
“He still has your bumper sticker on his car. He was so proud of you.”
“Proud of me?”
“You were vice president.”
I gave her a dismissive wave. “There’s this old joke: A man had two sons. One went out to sea, and the other became vice president. Neither were heard from again.”
She didn’t laugh, but I caught the corner of her lips curling up slightly.
“What I’m trying to say is your dad was a train conductor. That’s real responsibility right there. Never heard him complain once, in all the years I rode that train. I’m a better man for knowing your father. If he was proud of me, well, it goes both ways.”
“It’s nice to hear that,” she said.
“I’m sorry about your mother, too. I stopped by to see her yesterday. If I’d known sooner…”
“Dad wanted people to remember her as she was, not what she’d become. He visited her every day, first in the hospital, and then when they moved her to the facility. He felt terrible moving her there, but he couldn’t afford to keep her at home.”
I gave her shoulder a squeeze. The road to recovery for stroke victims was long and uncertain. For a woman Darlene Donnelly’s age, the road was even more perilous.
“I offered to drop out of college, to get a full-time job and contribute so we could bring her home, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it.”
Amtrak employees were supposed to have the best healthcare, straight from the United States government. Amtrak was a pseudo-private company, but I’d been one of the senators who’d fought for them to have the same healthcare plans other government employees had. Yet somewhere along the way, things had been diluted. It was no surprise that hospitals were booting patients out the door. The whole damn country’s healthcare infrastructure was falling apart—everything Barack had built. Everything we’d built.
I placed a hand on Grace’s shoulder. “Look at me,” I said. Her tears were welling up again. “This isn’t your fault.”
Without meeting my eyes, she said, “It didn’t matter how many hours of overtime he worked. In-home care was never going to be something he could afford. I’m not a finance major—I’m an English major—but even I knew it was a lost cause. Still, Dad believed until the end that he could swing it. There was a ray of light, however…”
“A ray of light.”
“It’s kind of funny, in a sick way. I thought there was a chance Dad’s life insurance payout would cover the cost to bring Mom home. He had a small Amtrak policy that was enough to pay for the funeral. But he took out another policy on himself shortly after Mom’s stroke. A million dollars. The lawyer my aunt hired is already saying the insurance company is trying to hold up the claim. They’re looking for some way to prove that he took his own life. That he did this on purpose.” Grace looked around the cemetery. “Who would do this on purpose?”
The lawyer was right, of course: the insurance company was going to fight the family’s claim tooth and nail. The family would be forced to sue to get them to pay out. The insurance company would come back with its own findings—findings that could run counter to the medical examiner’s report. I wondered, for the first time, if maybe Finn hadn’t laid down in front of that train on purpose, to leave his family the life insurance money. It was just plausible enough…
Except that didn’t explain everything. If he’d been planning to kill himself, why had he printed directions to my house? And why was there heroin in his pockets? The puzzle still had lots of missing pieces.
My mother had been big into puzzles.
I’d never had the patience for them.
What I really wanted to do was absorb Grace’s pain, but I knew it was an impossible task. Our pain is ours, and ours alone. All others can do is mitigate the damage.
And that’s what I would do for her: mitigate the damage.
Grace didn’t deserve to live with question marks surrounding her father’s death. The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but sometimes the universe needs a little help. It was the reason I’d gone into public service. Now I felt a similar tug. Some grave injustice seemed to be brewing. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I would do, but I couldn’t just watch from the sidelines.
“Your father was a good man,” I told Grace. “The insurance claims administrator didn’t know him. Your family lawyer didn’t know him, I’d bet. Not like you did. Not like I did.”
I looked her in the eyes. Hopefully, she couldn’t hear the traces of doubt in my voice. I was beginning to think that none of us knew the real Finn.
“I’m going to find the truth about your father,” I promised. “I’m giving you my word as a Biden.”