Stranger at a Funeral For Benjamin Lasseter

Mid-afternoon, a son-of-a-man sat in the golden glow filtering through his window to the right. From his wilting grey beard, you wouldn't assume he was gripping his fingers into the bed with the might of a man prepared to live. From the sharpness of his eyes, you wouldn't assume he was towing the line of a man prepared to die. On this day, he was Gold. Tomorrow, he'd be Mercury. His 80th birthday had come to show its meaty face. Tomorrow, his daughter would come, and so would his sticky grandchildren with their wide smiles.

His father would not. The man had become Barium and then he had gone. Where had he gone? With time, his skin grew thinner, more spotted with sun than his father's ever had. In the mirror, his skin over his eyes sagged as if it was trying to protect him from the sight. Here he was.

His father had stood at 5'9", ate a fried egg for breakfast with two cups of Earl Grey.

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To go to sleep, he took a concerning dose of valium. For a living, he first worked at an oil field, then later, as a history teacher. He named his only son Edward after the Black Prince of Wales who decimated the French city of Limoges in the 14th century and died before he could become king. Edward would later find this was the way of the lost world.

Before Edward was born, his father blessed his mother with a quart of wine before they danced at the end of June with the lights off.

When Edward became a man with a mortgage, he came to visit his father every Sunday. Here, sat a kitchen table, he learned everything there is to know about the tactics of war, love, and mirth. Upon the birth of his first child, Edward learned how to reconcile that life as he knew it had ended. "This will be your first death," his father told him. "There are many more to come. One day, you'll look down and there'll be pieces of you missing. Whole chunks."

He never came to visit the child, but when forced to hold it, he looked it right in the eyes and told it to get a job. Everyone laughed, but the man held the baby by the back of the head.

"This world will give you nothing. You've got to take it yourself. Rip it out with your bare hands."

Laughter. Fading laughter. An awkward chuckle. Edward took his daughter back. She was not crying.

Eventually, Edward's mother, a small owl-eyed woman, made the choice to leave for good. She had a new man in a navy suit from church, and her husband was eating her alive. It was unknown how these two people ended up together in the first place. As the story went, they met in a bar sometime after the war. They walked down an alleyway shortly after rain, and everything was glistening. She was mild, and he was not. That's all Edward knew. She said she hadn't been instantly taken with him - that he had been brash - but after speaking with him for a while, she saw a softness behind his eyes that she couldn't shake. In her last few days, she would mention him here and there, insist that she still didn't understand.

Edward's father began writing his will early in life, possibly before he grew his first grey hair. It was as if he knew he would die chasing pills with alcohol on the porch under a starless sky. No one could determine if it was suicide. For years, until everyone who knew the man became ridden with dementia, it was a topic of debate amongst distant relatives at Christmas. On one occasion, Aunt Genevive said "I knew that man. He loved himself far too much to take his own life. He valued his life more than he valued whiskey, and that was a lot."

Cousin Larry chimed in: "It was suicide. No argument about it. All those pills were messing with his brain. He wasn't like that as a kid, you know. He used to be happy."

A brother-of-a-brother, stumbling around with a bottle, made his claim, "Someone killed him! I know who it was!"

In his will, he determined his house should go into foreclosure, his belongings to the dump, and his money to a woman called Lucille Toll. There were many women that had come and gone in his life - a Sarah, a Sage, a Margot, a Kelly - but at some point, during a morning or an afternoon, he had sat down and written in ink that she was the one. Edward never found out who the woman was, but he assumed she deserved it. In place of his words, his life - his money. It was all he could give her, in the end. He left nothing for his children but a memory.

He stated, in firm words, that he would have a Viking funeral on Rialto beach.

"Burn me and leave me there."

In his father's bedroom, now just a bedroom, Edward laid him down. He combed through the coarse black and grey strands of hair across his scalp, put his gold watch back on his wrist, buttoned a shirt up his chest. Looking down at the cold body before him - pulse-less, thoughtless - he still felt that if he reached his hand down, laid it upon his father's breastbone, he would feel the warmth bleed through the shirt and onto his palm. The drum of his heart would play on under Edward's fingers. But when he touched his father, still sturdy despite his age, his chest was hollow. He tried to imagine what he would think of this corpse if he wasn't its son. If he was a stranger at a funeral. All he could see, though, was the winding ingenuity of his words - the force of his thoughts - the curtain of himself.

Edward and his siblings covered their father in a white linen sheet, put him on a stretcher for all passersby to see as they carried him down the shore. Perhaps they'd imagine who he once was. But they would never know.

They placed the body under a weighty pile of sandalwood. From a distance, it was a bonfire.

Flames reached up, singing the soft bare feet of angels in heaven. The pyre out on the beach burned what it could as the fingers of their father melted onto the hot bough erupting beneath. Afterward, rain fell onto the beach, leaving embers and ash in damp grey mounds. A lover from an undetermined time walked alone, a figure in the mist. A Viking funeral was the only way out - in a burst of fiery sun meant for witnessing. Leaving in the form of dust.

From the beginning of life to the quiet end, Edward noted that there weren't many changes.

He was born crying out and here it was, coming back to him. Tears when his daughter left the room. He never stopped grieving. Perhaps from the day Edward was born, he was grieving the man who made him. As he sat across from that kitchen table, hearing his father say everything there was to say, he was already standing on that beach, watching the water ebb and flow behind the blaze.

Decades later, after his father's voice had left and all evidence of his life lied still with the salt, Edward sat on a bed in the sunlight, laughing with tears in his eyes. He looked down at himself and it seemed there was nothing there at all. He would die a quiet death, he decided. He would go out in silence, cold and unseen. After all, today, he is gold. Tomorrow, he is Mercury. Why not, he thought.