When I returned home, somewhat late last night, I was wrung out. So tired that sleep came easily and fast. Sarah's post about the funeral is a beautiful chronicle of the day, so I won't duplicate the effort. I couldn't anyway.

My sisters and mother and I pored over countless pictures of my dad the night before, and I saw him again, as a younger man, before he was sick at all--and then later, pictures of him when he began to be ill--he looked like a different man. His diabetes and renal failure (he was on dialysis) ravaged his body and weathered his face. He looked so small the last 7 years of his life.

The pictures of him, my mother, and my sisters at Crystal's graduation in May break my heart. These are the pictures I would not be in because I was so upset about other things that were going on that day. I remember walking away and my father calling out to me to come and be in them, to stand with the family, and me calling back no, that I didn't want to. It reminds me of a John Mayer lyric ...should have smiled in that picture if it's the last that I'll see of you...
Given his health, it was a miracle that my dad even made it to Vermont. He looks so old in the photos from that weekend. He was only 55.

We decided, as a family, to donate his organs for transplant and medical research. His liver came at just the right time to save someone else's life. I know he would have wanted us to make that choice. I know he would be pleased. And even though my parents' marriage was dissolved, my mother arranged everything for him as a wife would have. God had done such a healing work in their relationship--they had become friends and were closer and more emotionally intimate than they had been when they were married. My mother told me that he'd shared with her, not that long ago, that he missed her. I know what he meant--I understand the nuances of the word missed he implied.

My mother's tears for him were the tears a woman cries when she has lost the man she loves. They had been together for nearly 30 years. When she wept over him in the hospital, her sobs were guttural, unhinged... and what she told us she remembered in that moment is how they would hold hands when they first met. I saw everything so differently. She had been in love with him for so long, and part of her always would be. The passion of their early courtship was still something she could feel. I realized. She had this man's children--this man who has died, and it humanized them both to me. I understood that my grief, however deep, however real, is completely different from hers.

He still loved her. She knew that. What was between them is something only they understood.

So when the soldiers at Quantico handed my mother my dad's flag and thanked her for his faithful service, I saw that this was exactly as it should be. She deserved his flag. No other person had the claim on him that she did. Before we left him, she put her hands on his coffin, her tears unchecked. It was so hard to leave him there like that--under the pavillion, waiting to be put into the earth, with our last letters to him tucked into his casket.