I steadied the hefty hymnal on the bench in front of me, but I didn’t need to glance down at the lyrics to follow along with them. However, I didn’t join in with the song, opting to instead mouth the words as I pretended to take part in the ceremony.
When the ceremony at last concluded, I took one last walk by the caskets with mother. My father’s casket remained open. When I had looked inside the casket the other night at the wake, his eyes had been closed, lips curled upward into the faintest of smiles, a whole arrangement intended to convey a sense of peace that I had never witnessed while he was alive. I didn’t look in the casket this time. I averted my eyes toward the ground. My last memory of him wasn’t going to be a lie.