When I realized you were there for me, I called on your name and you came
And you did, just what you said, for that I'll love you forever
-India Arie, Promises

Death Cab

It's weird to be the outsider in the limo. The Death Cab.

I tried to discreetly disappear, to stay behind, or ride somewhere less intrusive but they wouldn't let me.

They are burying someone they love. The man that made them who they are today and I—who never met him—am sitting here in the limo on the way to the cemetery.

His wife sits opposite me, on the far end of the cushy seats, with their son on one side and the medical aide on the other, and asks where we're going.

"Who's getting married again?"

"No one, Mom."

Her husband.

They've told her several times, I've seen her face crumble, I've seen her stoically take it, I've seen her glare.

But it's just too hard for them.

They've stopped confessing.

"When do courses start?" His daughter asks his grandson.

"Three weeks. I'm really looking forward to meeting the professors. I've studied a lot of their work in undergrad, I've written papers on them, and now I'll be talking to them."

"Kind of fucking amazing," his daughter says with her voice just drifting, her expression going soft, sort of sad. Everyone's does—everyone who's cognizant—and I think this is something. Something that means something to all of them. But I don't know what it is. I'm tempted to ask but I don't want to remind them I'm here.

I feel guilty enough that they've had to clothe me for this adventure in their own funereal blacks. The shoes are his wife's, the dress his granddaughter's, the shawl his daughter-in-law's, and the tights are something they had to procure. I am wrapped in other people's mourning just as I am wrapped in their clothes.

"I got a job," his grandson's girlfriend says. "It's just at this little place near the apartment, just waiting tables until I can get something in my field. There are some really great firms. But this will give me some time to find a good job rather than something that will keep me in groceries."

"It's a good idea," his daughter says, "it's hard to start out." She pats the young woman's knee. "It's very clever of you."

"We're just lucky I don't have to take the first thing."

"I remember my first job, real world, adult job." His daughter looks at his son shaking his head. She slaps out at his knee less gently than she had the woman's. "Oh, it wasn't that bad."

His children chuckle.

"Yes, it was."

His wife looks between them, her face scrunches, and then she laughs loudly. The aide moves to comfort her, distract her in some way from realizing she didn't understand what was going on around her. From realizing that she was only laughing to hide that she didn't know the joke.

The car comes to an unhurried halt, not the jarring stop I'm so used to announcing an arrival but a coasting finish so that you're not even sure you aren't still slightly in motion.

Death cab drivers must get special training.

And so we get out. We slowly disembark, the rest of us held hostage as the aide and his son maneuver his wife out of the leather seats and into the wheelchair's padded vinyl.

That's when she takes my hand.

At first it is just a tentative brush of the back of her hand against the back of mine. I smile over at her, his granddaughter, and bump hers again with mine, a love tap. She smiles back, weak and broken for her, and gives my fingers a squeeze lightly with her own. I squeeze back. Her hand shifts so I let mine and in another moment they are griped lightly, then solidly, then tightly.

We let go to crawl out and his son gallantly takes my hand to help me from the car.

I try to hang back again, to let them be the family and me just the person bringing up the rear but she's waiting, watching the ground as his daughter taps her shoulder on her way down the path to the gravesite I see looming maybe 50 yards away.

I walk over to her and she continues to just to inspect the grass, but when I reach her, she turns beside me and starts to follow the rest so I walk next to her and when we reach the grave side she takes my hand and pulls me with her to stand in the front, the familial spot.

Her hand grips and jerks in mine, the pressure inconstant and hesitant at first and then hasty and hard, a pulse that beats with the cadence of the things being said about him. About the man I've never met. The man lying in a casket five feet from me.

I try to listen to what they are saying, to the extended obituary being written before me but the death-grip forming on my hand distracts me. It's the pain. Sure, I mean it hurts me and my fingers feel cold from the lack of blood rushing through them. But it's her pain. The way I can feel it tremor when they call him Ed instead of Edward. When they say cusswords with special reverence. When there is that soft chuckle in their voices that says they loved him. What they say doesn't matter so much. If it's about work, or friends, or family, childhood or old age. It's the love that hurts her, hurts my hand.

And then it's time to bury him. To physically do it. I don't understand when the shovels in his children's hands pierce the dirt piles until the shovelfuls thud against the casket in the ground.

This time it is my turn to jerk, to clench my hand around hers.

It is the first time her fist around mine relaxes. I watch her dry, red eyes close. It is the continuing thud of the dirt and wood that finally brings tears to her eyes and she sighs.

The blood pounds feeling back into my finger tips as she leaves me to take the large spade in both hands and help bury him. Her face shining from the wet.

The noise is music now, rhythmical. I still can not relax into the sound, the idea of burying him myself.

But then a stranger hands me a shovel. I stare at it a moment before reaching out and taking it. The dirt piles have shrunk but there is still plenty to do before the hole is filled. And so I help. I help bury this stranger in a sea of them, wrapped in the blacks of his family, and breaking inside with every muted clump of earth landing on top of him.

And when I've done a couple shovelfuls I hand the heavy task off to the person behind me. I move to where the family seems to be making an impromptu reception line.

His wife, flanked by her children, smiles and nods, waves like a magnanimous queen heaving benedictions on the crowd. His son's face is flushed with the heat and he takes the hands offered when possible with both of his, hangs on to them for as long as he can before his daughter in-law takes them away, moves the condolers down the line. His daughter weeps without tears, smiling tightly, and making jokes. His grandson and the girlfriend nod and shake dumbly, not seeming to know the masses. His granddaughter cries and smiles, sad but warm, and hugs everyone as though she has known them all for years. When it is my turn she latches on to me with a desperation I can feel in the scrape of her fingers and sobs.

All I can do is cling back. I know no words for this, no comfort for this pain, so I squeeze, I press her to me as I wish osmosis worked this way, wish I knew something, wish I knew him.

A moment or two later there is someone else pressed against us. I feel a hand rubbing her back and my fingers against it, a light, slow circle. I feel a head rest on my shoulder, a large hand—very unlike the one at my back—cup my head.

It's odd but in the heat, the bodies feel cool, the touch only just warm not sweaty.

None of us speak as the small crowd comes apart and moves as one to the waiting black smudge of heat on the tarmac. His son, his daughter in-law, his granddaughter, and the stranger in me, we hold onto each other on way there. In the death cab we sit together. His son across from his wife, next to his daughter in-law an arm draped over his granddaughter's back, hand resting on her head on my shoulder. His daughter in-law holding my hand, wrapped inside his granddaughter's, her head on the small shoulder beside her. His granddaughter still sobbing quietly into my neck.

I feel the hand holding ours squeeze and look up, see kind, dripping eyes on mine.

"You know, he always said, 'Love is 80% showing up.'"

I wasn't positive what she meant but I knew I was here. I was with these people who didn't know me well, if at all. And if that gave them something, gave the weeping girl in my arms something, then it was everything I could do.

So with dirt still on my hands from the shovel, I squeezed back.