After he died I went through his toolbox where I found a Budweiser bottle cap onto which he’d carved the words “no more” with a pocket knife. I have no idea if this was from the last beer he had or if it was an artifact of some wishful moment. I used to carry that thing in my pocket everywhere I went, but then, like loose change, I lost it.

+

“You’re gonna miss me when I die,” he used to say all sing-song like he was Kris Kristofferson. He’d say this like he had a terminal illness. It was wishful thinking.

“Dad, please don’t say this to me because forcing me to constantly contemplate your mortality will fuck me up emotionally for life and turn me into a miserable people pleaser forever,” is what I should’ve said. But I was only a five-year-old. So all I said was, “Oh.”

+

When Dad was in high school, he and his friend drove across the state to see Led Zeppelin. They stopped at a liquor store on the way and bought a cheap bottle of wine, into which they dropped forty hits of acid. “Forty hits of acid?” I said years later when he told me this story. I told him this sounded like some real Manson family shit.

They watched the show from the upper deck, and as Jimmy Page played the opening notes of “Stairway,” Dad stood from his seat and walked off the balcony. Broke both legs. Later he’d say that an actual staircase had appeared in front of him and the seat started talking to him. I’ve always wondered what the seat said.

+

He obsessed over his credit card debt for decades. He’d maxed out a bunch of them back when he first started his construction business, right after I was born. “I’ll never pay these off,” he used to say to me, like it was my fault. I told him to just stop paying them, asked what’s the worst that could happen. “Money is fake,” I said. He told me to grow the fuck up. But when he died they wrote it all off. It just disappeared, like a magic trick. I wished he was alive so he could see that I won the argument.

I stand from the desk, toss this journal from my sight, and walk over to the kitchen. My wife is in here doing something normal like not thinking about how weird death is, and I say to her, “Hey, I want to transfer all our credit card debt to a different card, without you on the account.” She asks why. She asks if I am okay. I say, “Because I’m definitely gonna die way before you, so let’s fuck over Citi bank whenever my lights go out.” She doesn’t argue because she knows it’s true: she’s a runner, and I love bacon on everything.

“You’re writing about your dad, aren’t you,” she says. She tells me she’s making a grocery list and asks what I want for dinner.

+

In his early twenties, after his divorce from my other brother’s mom but before he knocked up my mom with me, he and his buddies were partying and ran out of booze. So Dad got in his van and drove over to a closed liquor store nearby and backed through the glass doors. They loaded up as much as they could as fast as they could. It was like a scene from Goodfellas. When a security guard confronted them, Dad called this person a “rent-a-pig” and beat him unconscious with a lug wrench. Later the rent-a-pig became an actual cop, and he followed Dad around town every day for a year. Never gave him a ticket, never even pulled him over, just followed him around, wanted Dad to know he was there, that he hadn’t forgotten the cheap shot at the liquor store. “He was probably looking for a chance to murder you,” I said to Dad. Dad shrugged, like he would’ve understood if the rent-a-pig had actually gone through with it.

+

He never imagined getting sober, which he did three years before he died. I always imagined I’d get a call one morning after he’d tied his car into a knot around some cottonwood while hauling ass over the country roads he liked to cruise when he was wasted. Instead, he had a massive heart attack one Saturday night after dinner, the kind they say you don’t even feel. He dropped softly where he stood like crank addicts do after a five day meth bender. He went out quietly, drowned where he stood. His last meal was hot dogs.

I push away from the desk again and tell my wife to put something good on the grocery list. I tell her that I’m going to make sure every meal we have from now on is something better than trash meat with cheap ketchup and watery mustard and relish. “Relish is fucking gross,” I say. “Let’s have ribeyes or something.”

+

The last thing Dad did before he died was to make a run to Sears to buy a battery for his riding lawnmower. I stopped by while he was out on this errand. I called him and asked where he was, and when he told me I said I didn’t have time to wait around so I’d just see him tomorrow. He said okay, and we shot the shit for a few minutes but I don’t remember what we talked about.

Dad texted me about the Royals later that night. They were defending champs that year, and his text said, “First win of the season, hope you seen it.” I sent back a GIF of Bill Murray doing a hip thrust. So I guess technically the last thing I said to my dad was Bill Murray humping the air. After a certain age I’m going to end every conversation by talking about something important, like how evil the Republican party is or something.

+

When we went to the funeral home they walked us into a room filled with caskets. There were these metal coffins mounted on a wall and arranged by price so that customers could inspect them as they walked by. The most expensive casket’s big feature was Tempur-Pedic bedding. The cheapest option was over in the corner — this wooden casket-thing, a brittle pine box that was exactly like what you’d see if you time-traveled to some desert town in the Old West or something. It blew my mind. “Is this for real?” I asked. Everyone just looked at me. I looked at the price. Five hundred bucks. “This is like two sheets of plywood and a handful of finish nails,” I said. “There isn’t even a coat of stain on it.” They still only stared at me. “I could build this for like forty bucks. Seriously, that includes labor.” Mom said she didn’t want me to build a coffin for our dad.

The lady selling us the funeral told us that her dad was the county medical examiner, that he would be dissecting our dad to find out exactly what had gone wrong inside him. She said it was a good thing we’d chosen her family’s funeral home because we’d find out the cause of death way sooner. It was a perk, she said.

We sat down — me, Mom, my brother, and my other brother — and we looked through these pamphlets. One of them suggested we buy the better concrete case that surrounds the coffin. (There’s a word for it, but I don’t know what it is and I’m not going to look it up.) This good one had a fifty year structural integrity warranty, which meant if you paid an extra couple grand for it you could guarantee that the thing wouldn’t cave in for half a century. There was even an illustration of the earth punching through one of these things, letting groundwater pour over an already floating coffin, threatening to drown the dead if you were cheap enough to pass on the upgrade. I turned to my brother and said, “One of us needs to live to old age so we can come out to the graveyard with a shovel and see if this thing held up.” Everyone stared at me again. I turned to my other brother. He always backed me up. I said to him, “This way we can put in a warranty claim if it’s fucked, get a new one.”

The saleswoman answered a phone call right in the middle of everything. “Hi, Dad,” she said, really rubbing it in as far as I was concerned. We thumbed through the literature in front of us until she hung up. I looked at my brother, who was reading about plastination. “Great news!” she said. We leaned forward, ready to hear anything good. “They finished with him early and are gonna bring him over here tonight instead of tomorrow morning.” We all leaned back in our chairs, all of us had to be wondering what was so good about it. I imagined what it meant to get done with him early. I pictured a bone saw splitting Dad open, some doctor looking him over and sewing him back up like some kind of giant meat doll, probably hurrying through it because it was getting close to lunch time, because they were still alive with bodies that craved things. She told us the cause of death was myocardial infarction.

Later my brother told me in the hallway that good news would have been Dad sitting up right before they spun that saw blade onto his chest, pushing the doctor away, walking over to a phone and calling us, saying, “Come pick me up,” and, “What the fuck were you about to let them do to me?”

After that we went outside and sat on the tailgate of my truck. I sat between my brothers and handed them each a cigarette from our dad’s last packet of Marlboros. We sat there and chain smoked the rest of them, and my other brother said, “Where do you think they store the formaldehyde?” I asked how the hell should I know. “Wait…why?” I said. He said he’d like to soak a few Swisher Sweets in some if he got the chance, smoke them after the funeral.

We did everything cheap but it still cost sixteen grand to bury my dad. Minus the headstone. Weeks later, when we drove Mom over to design the granite, she got all this intricate shit carved into it, shit that didn’t even make sense, like a bird, a Bible verse, and a hunting rifle. Dad hated all those things. She kept saying it was Dad’s, “Last hurrah.” I really wanted her to stop saying that. It cost her twenty-five hundred dollars to get it done and set into the ground that November before the land froze. That was five years ago. I still haven’t been up there to see it.

+

As I spoke at Dad’s funeral, as he lay napping in the average rated coffin next to me, I looked out at the crowd. It was a sparse turnout. Dad would’ve liked that. He hated attention. My eyes stopped on a police officer standing near the back. I wondered if the rent-a-pig was there to get the last laugh, or had Dad made it through the Alcoholics Anonymous steps eight and nine, if he’d let himself make amends. I almost said, “If my dad ever assaulted anyone in this room, I’m sure he eventually felt real bad about it.” Instead I just read my words. Later, I published the eulogy I wrote for my dad, pitched it as a weird essay about death, probably because I am at least a little bit desperate for attention.

+

He’s buried in Camden, Missouri, fifty miles from my home, on a hill that overlooks train tracks. From there you can see over these flood plains all the way to the Missouri River. Dad and his grandpa would sit up there and smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes together when Dad was a kid. They looked on through the smoke one time as a pick-up truck parked on the tracks right as a train went by. Dad said the man laid his forehead against the steering wheel as the air brakes howled.

The four of us rode up in the hearse with Dad. The man who drove us was in his eighties, and he drove ninety miles an hour the whole way, probably because he knew someone would be driving him to some hole in some field soon enough. Time was precious. And he kept jerking the wheel because he was drowsy from the hypnotic effect of that long easy curve of the highway. It floats in front of you when you stare too long, even if you’re not drunk. We laughed a little each time the hearse twitched off the rumble strip, each of us probably figuring that, though we didn’t want to die, you had to admit it would be kind of funny if we went out like this, if Dad dragged us into the afterlife with him while we were trying to bury him.

+

I read recently in some science magazine that it’s likely we are aware that we’re dead for up to three hours after we have officially died. Scientists say your brain is the last part of you to let go, and in the process of doing the last thing it’ll ever do, it gets flooded with all these chemicals that make your senses hyper aware long after your heart has stopped. Yeah, it ruined my day too when I read it.

Dad’s eyes were open when they let us into the little room at the hospital where they’d pronounced him dead. That really bothered Mom, the way he was staring up at the ceiling while we waited for the priest to come in and give him his Last Rites. Mom was the believer but Dad had always called himself a heathen. She went and got a nurse and said, “Can you close his eyes?” The nurse rolled his own eyes and pressed on Dad’s eyelids until they shut for good. He hurried out and checked his cellphone once in the hall. I was jealous of him. Water leaked out of Dad’s eyes. Little wet lines streaked down his sideburns and dripped off the earlobes he always tugged on when he was nervous.

We all had a moment with him before we left. I was the last one. I went in there and bent down and kissed his forehead. I rubbed my hand over the whiskers on his cheek. I pressed the creases of my hand into his, and told him the last thing he supposedly heard.

+++