We didn’t have a funeral.
I spread his ashes under the tree by his shop, as were his wishes, without ceremony. No gathering. No eulogies. No people saying beautiful things about a man they knew only partially, constructing the clean narrative that funerals tend to construct — the edited version of a complicated person, adjusted for public grief.
Funerals, when they happen, often do something specific: they create a legible story about a person whose actual life was not legible in the same way. The difficult parts get softened. The complexity gets resolved. The people who hurt you say something about how they loved you, and the people listening receive it as truth because the occasion demands it.
My father was a former abuser who became different in the last twenty years. How do you eulogize that honestly? The clean tribute — “a man of quiet strength” — would omit the most significant parts of the story. The honest accounting would be too uncomfortable for public consumption. The ashes under the tree asked nothing of me except to be there.
Mark Epstein writes that grief requires the willingness to face what is actually there rather than the version we’d prefer to feel. No funeral meant no performance. No requirement to transform the mess into something presentable. Just me, his ashes, a tree by his shop. No clean narrative. The full complexity of thirty-odd years of a father-son relationship — all the harm and the late change and the things left unresolved — held in silence rather than smoothed into something easier to share.
That’s more honest than any eulogy would have been. And honest — even when it’s quiet, even when it’s under a tree without ceremony — is the only version of grief I know how to do anymore.
