I felt numb. There was something dead in me. It was hard for me to talk. After Mass, the priest spoke to my mother. So many people knew my mother. People hugged her, and there was a kind of beauty in the words they used when they spoke to her.
I wanted to be anywhere but there.
I wanted to go home and find my father sitting on the front porch, waiting for us.
I just wanted the day to be over.
And then Monday would come.
And then Tuesday would come and the final semester of my senior year would begin—but I would not be going to school. I would be going to my father’s funeral.
Thirty-Six
Dear Dante,
I keep repeating to myself, my father is dead my father is dead my father is dead. I write and rewrite my father’s eulogy—my father is dead my father is dead my father is dead. I look out the window to see if he is in the backyard smoking a cigarette—my father is dead my father is dead my father is dead. He is sitting across from me at the kitchen table and I hear him telling me what I know but refuse to accept: “The problem is not that Dante is in love with you. The problem is that you’re in love with Dante.” My father is dead my father is dead my father is dead.
Dante, I’m so sad. My heart hurts. It hurts. I don’t know what to do.
Thirty-Seven
DANTE COMES OVER IN THE afternoon. He tells me it looks like I’ve been crying. I tell him I’m tired. We escape to my room and we lie down on my bed and I fall asleep as he holds me. I keep repeating, My father is dead my father is dead my father is dead.
Thirty-Eight
I’D ATTACHED MY FATHER’S DOG tags to the cross Gina and Susie had given me. When I got out of the shower, I put them on. I stared at myself. I shaved. My father had taught me how to do that. When I was a small boy, I would watch him in wonder. I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror as I tied my tie. My father had taught me how to tie a tie the day before I made my First Communion. I tied my shoelaces. My father had taught me how to do that, too. I was surrounded by him, my father.
* * *
It was strange to follow my father’s casket as the eight pallbearers walked beside it, four on each side. Sam Quintana was one of my father’s pallbearers, and Susie’s father was too. Over many years they had discussed books, a fact I had only recently become aware of because I had paid so little attention to my father’s life. The rest of the pallbearers were mail carriers. My mother and I walked down the aisle arm in arm. My sisters and their husbands followed behind.
I tried to pay attention to the Mass, but I was too distracted. I was nervous about giving my father’s eulogy and the church was full, all of the Catholic Daughters dressed in white and sitting together—including Mrs. Alvidrez.
Dante and Mrs. Q and Sophocles were sitting behind us. I wasn’t paying attention to the priest when he began his sermon. I could see the priest’s lips moving—but it seemed as though I had lost my hearing.
After communion, the priest motioned to me. My mother squeezed my hand. I felt Dante’s hand on my shoulder. I rose from the pew and made my way to the pulpit. I reached in my pocket and unfolded the eulogy that I’d written for my father. My heart was racing. I had never spoken in front of a church full of people. I froze. I closed my eyes and thought of my father. I wanted him to be proud of me. I opened my eyes. I looked out at the sea of people. I saw my sisters and my mother clothed in their grief. I looked at the words I’d written—and began:
“My father worked for the US Postal Service. He was a mail carrier, and he was proud of what he did. He was proud to be a public servant, and he was far prouder of his service to this country as a mail carrier than his service to his country as a soldier.
“My father fought in a war, and he brought a piece of that war with him when he came back home. He was a silent man for many years but, a little at a time, he broke that silence. He told me that one lesson he learned in Vietnam was that every human life is sacred. But later he told me, people say that all lives are sacred but they’re lying to themselves. My father hated a few things; racism was one of them. He said he worked hard to rid himself of his own racism. And that is what made my father a great man. He didn’t blame other people for the problems of the world. He pointed to the problems of the world within himself and fought a battle to rid himself of them.
“My mother gave me the journal my father was keeping. My father filled the pages of several journals over the years, and I was going through them as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say. Reading a passage was like sitting inside his brain. When I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I longed to know what my father was thinking, this silent man who seemed to be living in the memory of a war that left his heart and mind wounded. But he was far more present than I imagined him to be. I had no idea who my father was. And so I made him up. Which brings me to this entry he wrote when I was fourteen years old:
“ ‘America is the country of invention. We are a people who constantly invent and reinvent ourselves. Mostly our inventions of who we are are fictions. We invent who Black people are and make them out to be violent and criminal. But our inventions are about us and not about them. We invent who Mexicans are, and we become nothing more than a people who eat tacos and break piñatas. We invent reasons to fight wars because war is what we know, and we make those wars into heroic marches toward peace, when there is nothing heroic about war. Men are killed in wars. Young men. We tell ourselves they died to protect our freedoms—even when we know that is a lie. I find it a tragedy that such an inventive people cannot bring themselves to invent peace.
“ ‘My son Ari and I are fighting a war. We are fighting a war with ourselves and with each other. We have resorted to inventing each other. My son dislikes me—but he is disliking his own invention. And I am doing the same. I wonder if we will ever find a way out of this war. I wonder if we will ever be brave enough to call a truce, imagine peace, and finally see each other for who we are and stop this nonsense of inventing.’
“My father and I did finally manage to stop the war we were fighting. I stopped inventing him and finally saw him for who he was. And he saw me.
“My father cared about the world he lived in. He thought we could do a lot better, and I think he was right, and I loved that he cared about things that were bigger than the smaller world he lived in. In one journal entry he wrote: ‘There are no reasons to hate other people—especially other kinds of people. We make up reasons why other people are less human than we are. We make up reasons and then we believe those reasons and then those reasons become true and they are true because now we believe they are facts and we even forget where it all started—with a reason we made up.’
“My father wasn’t just my father. He was a man. He was a man aware of the larger world around him. He loved art and read books about art. He had several books on architecture, and he read them. He had a curious mind and he wanted to know things and he didn’t think he was the center of the universe and he didn’t think that what he thought and what he felt were the only things that mattered. And that made him a humble man. And I’m going to quote him here. He said, ‘Humility is in short supply in this country, and it would be a good thing if we went in search of it.’