I first saw a grown man cry at my Grandpa’s funeral.  It was late November, on a Saturday.  Leaves were fading from orange to gray and the air thick with cold.  There had not been snow yet, but the ground was frozen.  I was nineteen, wedged against four sisters and six cousins on a hard, wooden pew. My Nana sang in the Lutheran choir so the funeral was down the road from our usual Baptist house of worship.  The Lutheran church had huge, flat grey stones covering the outside like a medieval castle; all that was missing was a moat and drawbridge. In the interior hung heavy purple curtains beside banners that depicted Christ’s resurrection in crimson paint.  Drafts of wind jabbed at us through the ceiling cracks and I remember shivering despite the heat from my sister Alexis’ shoulder.

My Grandpa’s funeral was my first. The pamphlet my Auntie Sherri handed out at the door showed him standing in front of the wood cabin at Glen Lake with his barrel chest filling out a red plaid work shirt and a green baseball cap covering his white hair.  We sang his two favourite songs, “Peace in the Valley” and “The Little Brown Church in the Vale.”  My father sat in the pew ahead of us next to Uncle Fred.  Uncle Fred reminded me of Grandpa the most.  He was the oldest of six and the tallest, the type of man who got up early and was among the trees before the rest of the world stirs.  But Fred was a quiet man.

My Grandpa had been big, in stature and personality.  He had an air about him, so when he walked into a room, he filled the space.  His funeral brought people from as far as Florida and nearer than next door.  The unfamiliar faces in the pews made me realize he had a whole other life before mine that I knew little about.  What I did know was that Grandpa had phenomenal eyebrows, curly and wild, fuzzy white caterpillars straining to escape his wrinkled forehead.  I knew he loved ketchup and put it on everything-soup, turkey and even ice cream.  I knew he grew vegetables in long wooden boxes before it was “hip” to grow your own.  I knew he hid booze in his toolbox and mounted the heads of deer in his garage above his grey Cadillac.  I knew I never saw him cry.

I had never heard a eulogy before.  At the pulpit were six people: two uncles, three aunts and my father. I stared at Fred.  He looked uncomfortable in his suit. The sleeves of the navy jacket seemed too tight for his beefy arms.  I could tell he wanted to tear it off and put on his blue work shirt, the one with the rip in the left pocket.  I could tell he wanted to run from the stuffy church, sit on the high seat of his tractor, and think about which variety of apple would sell best this year or what needed to be done before the snowfall.  To wrap his hands around his pruning shears, feel his nose numb in the cold and think about repairing the fence on the Millar property.  Like me, he wanted to think about anything besides his father’s death.  My aunts and uncles were expected to say a few words: what they remembered; what they wanted us to remember about their father.  We waited in a prickly silence while Uncle Fred was motionless, dress shoes scuffed with dirt.

When he did step up to the microphone, I traced his grief. It began in his knees, tiny wobbles like a newborn calf attempting to walk, then travelled up his legs to his chest, where he gripped his tie until his knuckles went white, from there to his jaw, the clench of his teeth visible through dry lips. The crack of his voice was the hardest; listening to his deep baritone disintegrate into a mountain of sobs was to witness a dove drowning.

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