I stared at him in horror. “He asked you to give up your move? Your career?”
“He essentially asked me to become your new life supervisor! He wanted me to call you every single day. To force you to eat. To choose where you traveled. To be the one to decide when you had helped other people enough and needed to stop.”
My knees hit the carpet before my brain even registered that I was falling. Daniel instantly dropped down right beside me.
“That’s why we fought, Mom,” he cried. “He told me exactly what you were going to do today. He said you were going to tell everybody you were ‘fine.’ That you’d obsessively organize his funeral, make sure everyone was fed afterward, answer every phone call, scrub the house clean, and make yourself incredibly useful until nobody even noticed you were secretly falling apart.”
I thought about the box of sympathy cards I had nearly fought his aunt to carry just five minutes earlier. Daniel saw the crushing recognition dawn on my face.
“That’s why I got so angry,” he explained, his voice breaking. “He kept saying, ‘Somebody has to make sure your mother is okay.’ And I finally snapped. I yelled, ‘Why don’t you just tell Mom this yourself?!’”
I pressed one hand firmly against the carpet to steady myself. “What did he say to that?”
Daniel looked directly into my eyes. “He said you were carrying enough.”
I squeezed my eyes shut as fresh tears finally spilled over. Of course he did. Richard had said those exact words hundreds of times throughout our marriage.
“Don’t tell Mom yet. She’s carrying enough.”
“I’ll handle the bill. Tisha has enough going on.”
“Let her sleep in. She carries enough.”
Once upon a time, I had honestly believed those words were the ultimate expression of love. And maybe, in a way, they were. But sitting on the floor of the funeral home, I suddenly heard the terrifying undertone hidden inside them.
It was a decision. Made entirely for me, without my input.
“I told him he was doing it again,” Daniel whispered.
“Doing what?”
“Deciding what you could handle without ever actually asking you.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “Dad got furious. He said he was dying and didn’t have the time or energy to argue about it.”
“And what did you do?”
“I told him that if he wanted you to have your own life so badly, he needed to start by letting you have your own answers.” Daniel looked down in shame at the pink dress he wore. “I told him I loved you, Mom… but I wasn’t going to sacrifice my future to manage yours. He begged me to promise anyway. So, I left.”
“You thought if you stayed, he’d force you to fix something he was too afraid to talk to me about?”
“Yes.”
I looked toward the heavy chapel door. Richard had finally, at the very end of his life, noticed that I was slowly disappearing inside the machinery of our family. And somehow, even in his final act of love, he had tried to solve the problem by assigning me to someone else.
“So…” I sniffled, gesturing to his outfit. “Why wear the dress today?”
Daniel gave a pathetic, miserable little shrug. “After Dad died, I was so angry I almost didn’t come today. But then I remembered exactly what he predicted you’d do.”
My hand rested gently on the pink fabric covering his knee. “Organize everything?”
“Comfort everybody. Make sure everybody ate,” he nodded. He gave me a sad, watery smile. “He was right. I watched you for twenty minutes out there. So, I figured there was only one thing you couldn’t possibly organize your way around.”
Despite the heaviness in my chest, a laugh bubbled up in my throat. “Your giant self walking into your father’s conservative funeral dressed like me at 23?”
“Exactly,” he grinned.
