This is my first migraine, and fu-
neral. “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds
of Earth, “And danced the skies on laughter-
silvered wings …” An officer in full dress is standing
before the casket reciting “High Flight,” the pilot’s anthem, the same poem that always graced our mantelpiece on a decoupage plaque wedged between the other mementos of my father’s career, a model of the T-37, the T-38, the A-1 Skyraider, the F-16. If only the sun would just go away, I
our road trips are filled with sound. And sometimes fury. Earlier in the trip, as we stop at a
gas station, Zack announces he has had enough of the book we have been listen- ing to on the drive. “Too much descrip- tion, not enough action,” he complains of Carson McCullers’s 1940 classic “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” about the small-town South. “Can’t we listen to ‘Huck Finn’?” he demands. He recently read “Tom Sawyer.” Twain amuses him. “But we’re almost finished with
this.”
“So?” “You’d quit in the middle?” “Yes.” “Really? You’d quit a book without
learning the end?” What kind of child have I raised? “It’s boring.” “But I want to find out what hap-
pens.” I click on the CD player. How could he not love this story? I loved this story. “Mom, you always do what you
want.” “I do not!” He scrunches down in the back seat
and stews. “Oh, fine,” I relent after a few min-
utes, switching the CD player off and scrunching down in the front passenger seat to stew. My husband tosses the keys into the
car, says he will be back in a sec. I take the keys, restart the car and turn on the air. It is getting hot. With the car running, Zack plugs his iPod into the stereo, blaring Linkin Park’s “Numb.” “This is what I think of you,” he hurls. The lyrics fill the car: “I’m tired of be-
ing what you want me to be/Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface … Every step that I take is another mistake to you.” When he gets to his favorite line, he belts it out: “… all I want to do is be more like me and be less like you.” I slink down deeper, leaning my head
into the wedge of space between seat and door. I close my eyes, thinking, I’d like to shoot whoever proposed this vacation.
the casket and the polished metal trig- gers of salute rifles, and is boring a hole in my head. Jagged flashes of lightning bolts interrupt my peripheral vision.
i
t is hot, 97 degrees on June 19, 1977. The fierce sun in this tree- less quadrant of the cemetery is glinting off the silver handles of
think, dreaming of my morning swim in the Officer’s Club pool, of diving and slicing weightless through the cool wa- ter. A hot wind huffs at my blond hair, hanging limp to my waist, shiny with sweat and smelling faintly of chlorine. (I considered my morning swim sufficient substitution for bathing and shampoo.) I worry that my armpits are dampening the patchwork sundress I wear. I worry that people might be looking at me. I worry that I will cry. Or won’t. Why are we here? I wonder, squint-
ing against the brutal blue sky. We chose this Southern cemetery for its cool peace, the majestic live oaks, broad- leafed magnolias and canopies of Span- ish moss that sheltered the crumbling gravestones in restful shade. But the burial lot we have been given for my dad sits far away from the rest. Here, slim saplings have just been planted, and the few graves are interruptions: sharp-edged rectangles of bare red clay marching in relentless formation across the newly seeded ground. It is ugly, un- pleasant. Who would want to be here? I try to still my rising panic. We can’t leave him here. It’s ugly. My thoughts fly, whirling about the
closed casket and the body, “burned be- yond recognition” inside. What is in the casket — a big box for a smattering of ashes, or is there more? If it is just ashes, is this all a put-on? Had they scooped up some ashes from the crash site, put it in a plastic baggie and tossed it in a casket? Could the ashes just as well be a powdered bit of debris from a plane’s leather seat? What are we burying? And then my panic abates. We are not leav- ing him in this place. Because, of course, he is not really dead.
June 20, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 21
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