I never expected to bury my child. It is the most unnatural thing on earth—to stand upright while they lower your boy beneath it. Richard was thirty-eight. I was sixty-two. April rain threaded through the oaks at Green-Wood Cemetery and slicked the marble angels until they looked like they were weeping with us. Sound came thin and far away: the scrape of shovel on wet soil, a zipper of thunder somewhere over the harbor, the soft human noises people make when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
I remember thinking the world should stop. Just for a minute. Traffic on Fourth Avenue, the F train rumbling under our feet, planes on their way to somewhere sunnier—all of it should have gone still in recognition that my boy, the boy who once tried to glue macaroni to a shoebox to make me a “jewelry safe,” was now inside a polished mahogany box disappearing into the ground.
Grief walled me off from everything. Faces blurred at the edges until only the casket remained in focus, the raw mouth of earth, my own name spoken in softened tones by people I barely recognized. A cousin pressed a tissue into my fist. Someone from Richard’s company squeezed my elbow and murmured, “He was a visionary, Eleanor.” The words slid off like rain off the funeral tent.
Across the grave stood my daughter-in-law Amanda—precision hair, liner that wouldn’t dare smudge, posture like a trademark. Married to Richard for three years and somehow already the gravitational center of his world. Her black Chanel looked like a dress made for sponsorship dinners, not for the edge of a grave. She accepted condolences with a professional tilt of her head, like grief was a networking opportunity she was managing with appropriate solemnity.
When our eyes met, she arranged a sympathetic smile that never touched anything living. There had been a time I tried to love her simply because my son did, because after cancer took his father Thomas five years earlier, I had promised myself I would not be the stereotype of the jealous mother-in-law. But with Amanda, there was always the sense of something calculated humming behind her eyes, like a spreadsheet running in the background of every conversation.
“Mrs. Thompson?” A man in a gray suit waited until the last handful of soil hit wood. His umbrella dripped neatly at his side. “Jeffrey Palmer. Palmer, Woodson & Hayes. Richard’s attorney. The reading of the will is at the penthouse in an hour. Your presence is requested.”
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