My father is 98 years old, and I plan for his funeral all the time. I anticipate it, and I keep myself ready. When I went on vacation to Florida last summer, I packed a black dress and heels just in case I needed to catch a quick plane back. He’s not sick. He’s actually in good health, but the numbers are against him, and I like to be ready.
When I went to my father’s house for Christmas I decided it would be a good time to talk to him about his funeral, so I tried to bring it up while he was watching Sean Hannity. My dad loves Sean Hannity and thinks he is a real newscaster. “Did you hear what he said about Trump’s Attorney General?” my Dad asked. Actually he yelled it because he can no longer hear himself, so when the TV is on everything is loud, including the TV. All I have to do is yell, “Yeah, I know,” to everything.
I quickly grabbed the remote and hit the down volume button before dropping it inside the arm of my lounge chair. Dad’s head bounced back and forth as he looked for his vanished remote control. “Dad, I need to ask you something.” His hands began digging down into the seat cushions of his chair. “Dad, listen to me for a minute.”
“Where?” was all he could ask.
“Dad, do you remember where you put your .22?” I didn’t really need to know where his .22 rifle was, but I knew that asking about it would make him focus on something besides the remote and Sean Hannity, who now was a silent talking head on the 42 inches of my Dad’s TV.
“My what?”
“Your .22 rifle. Do you remember where you put it?”
“You want to go shoot?” His hands stopped and his watery eyes sharpened, or what passes for sharpened when you’re 98.
“Sure, let’s go,” I said.
My dad didn’t even question why I would want to go shoot a rifle at dusk the day after Christmas. I guess to my dad, any day was a good day to shoot a gun. He was a sniper in World War II, and though he never talked about it, I got the feeling he had been very good at hitting human targets. He told me to get the rifle from the back of his closet and then head out to the barn. On the way he stopped at the recycling bin in the garage and filled a grocery sack with Mello Yello cans. Following behind, I was careful to keep the barrel pointed safely upward, and we tromped across the high, dead grass out the back gate and down to the barn, sagging and locked shut, about a hundred yards into the pasture.
“You got it on safety?” Dad called over his shoulder. He stooped so far forward I could hardly see his head. From behind, he looked like a wheel rolling forward.
“Got the safety on,” I yelled. We neared the barn where a pile of rotting lumber was stacked. My dad waited, out of breath, and impatient for me to catch up. He pointed at the gun, and motioned with his head, willing me to understand. I nodded, stopped at the pile, and rested the butt of the gun on the wood. Reaching for the loading rod, I turned it, unlocked the muzzle, and pulled it up and out of the magazine.
“You bring the bullets?” my dad asked.
I rolled my eyes and replied, “Yes, I brought the bullets.” I pulled the box from my coat pocket and began slowly loading the gun. My dad watched the bullets go in one at a time, and as I loaded neither of us said anything. I counted the shells, seven in, eight more to go. I still hadn’t brought up his funeral. The last time anyone had mentioned it was the previous summer, and it had been in response to a western on the TV about a family living out on the prairie. The grandfather had died in the middle of a blizzard, so the family wrapped him up tight and hoisted his body up onto the roof of the house to keep it frozen until spring when the ground would thaw and they could bury him. “That’s a waste of a perfectly good quilt,” said my father, eyeing the nine-patch quilt stretched around the corpse. “When I die don’t waste any of my good suits on me. A golf shirt will do me fine, unless I die when it’s cold. Then you can put my good fleece jacket on me. The blue one.”
At the woodpile Dad began lining up cans next to where I was loading the gun. I was up to thirteen shells, and my hands moved more slowly. “How many is that?” Dad asked.
I pushed one more into the muzzle. “That’ll do it.” I returned the loading rod to its position and closed it up. “You want to go first?” I asked, raising the gun butt from the wood pile.
“I reckon I might can still hit something.” Dad motioned for me to follow him and we headed beyond the barn straight into the sinking sun. When he was satisfied with the distance, he stopped and turned around so that our backs were to the light. I held the gun out to him. He took it both hands and inspected it. “Mmmm-hmm,” he muttered, apparently satisfied with my handling. “I’m aiming for the middle. Maybe I’ll hit something by accident.”
My father was still a crack shot, even at 98. He strained to straighten his back sufficiently to get into firing position, adding at least six inches to his height. He raised the gun to his shoulder, groaning at the effort. His hands were deadly still on the gun as his finger easily encircled the trigger. He squeezed and the recoil jerked him backwards. I reflexively put out a hand to catch him if he kept moving backward, but he braced his feet and righted himself.
All of the cans were intact.
“Why’d you want to come out here?” Dad’s eyes remained on the line of cans. “You never want to come shooting anymore unless you want to ask me something.”
I was seventy-three years old, his youngest daughter, and I hadn’t gone out shooting with my dad for at least ten years. “Just thought we could spend some time together,” I replied. “We don’t do much together since mom died.”
“You need money?”
“No, I’m fine with money.”
“You getting married again?” He fired once more and the third can from the left wobbled but did not fall.
I rolled my eyes behind his back. “No, I’m done with that.”
“So you don’t need money or men. What’s left for a woman at your age?” Dad turned and held the rifle out to me. I took it in both hands the way he had taught me when I was ten, and I stepped up to the flat place in the grass where he had stood.
I raised the gun into position and squeezed my right eye shut, trying to focus through my left eye on the bright green and yellow cans. “I thought we should talk about your funeral. Talk about arrangements,” I blurted.
“Why? You plan on shooting me?”
“I really hadn’t thought about it,” I said, squeezing off a shot. The third can pinged off the wood pile.
Dad shook his head. “You can still aim.”
I couldn’t resist a proud smile. “I was always a better shot than my brothers.”
“It’s easy to hit something that ain’t running or flying.” His smile dropped and he looked away.
“I guess it is.” I squeezed off four more shots and knocked two cans off the pile. Dad nodded appreciatively.
“You figure I’m going to die?”
“You figure you’re not?”
“Well, I don’t plan on doing it before Saturday,” said Dad.
“What’s happening Saturday?”
Dad snapped his fingers and motioned for me to hand him the gun. “Lion’s Club Pancake Breakfast. I got two tickets,” he said.
“That would be a terrible waste of twenty dollars if you missed that. I’ll be sure and ask for a refund if that happens.”
Dad flicked his thumb over his shoulder, a gesture that meant get out of the way. He stepped into the firing spot, fixed his feet shoulder width apart, and raised the rifle to his shoulder smoothly. The sun was too low on the horizon now to gleam off the cans, and he held the gun very still for what seemed a minute. The wind picked up and blew his white hair against his forehead. He held steady until the wind died down once more, and then he fired. The can in dead center disappeared into the grass behind the wood pile.
Dad turned to face me and lowered the gun barrel toward the ground. “When Randall died you were only twenty-six years old. No woman should have to bury a husband so young. And you weren’t even fifty when Reggie had the cancer. You had to watch him take a whole year to die. Your mother nearly worried herself to death over you.” Dad waved a hand in the motion he makes when he is trying to remember something. I had a guess.
“I was sixty when Edmund died,” I said. Edmund had been my third husband, or as I liked to put it, my third strike. All three had been mistakes in their own way, but the first two had died while I was still figuring that out. Edmund’s announcement of his brain cancer had been the only thing that prevented me from filing the divorce papers that I had just picked up from my attorney’s office.
“Yeah, Edmund. I was trying to remember his name,” said Dad. “I reckon you’ve got more experience with that sort of thing than any of your brothers.”
“You mean funerals?”
“Death.”
We let the word hang between us for a while.
“The death part we can’t control, but I thought you’d want to decide how you want to be buried. I don’t mean today, but I just thought we should talk about it.”
Dad lifted the rifle and began inspecting the barrel. “I don’t give a damn how I’m buried. You can put me under that wood pile if you want to.”
“Don’t you want to set things up yourself? Most people want to know things are going to be done the way they want them. They don’t want to leave it up to other people,” I said.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Dad snapped. “Having to set up another funeral?”
“You know how I am, I’m a planner.” The conversation was not going at all as I had planned. Then it hit me that I really did have a plan for everything.
“I don’t reckon your brothers would be any damn help,” said Dad. The sun was nearly gone now, and I could make out only a hank of my father’s thin white hair hanging like a dragon fly’s wings over his forehead. “After Lonnie’s heart attack I was sure he’d go next.”
I thought my father was going to depart for the house, but he put the rifle to his shoulder once more and aimed into the dying light in the general direction of the cans. “You can’t possibly see those cans,” I said.
“Shut your mouth,” said Dad, but his tone wasn’t angry. He needed quiet to concentrate. The pasture was so dark now I could barely make out the outline of the wood pile, let alone the four remaining cans. Dad shifted his feet and settled into the earth. His steady hands gripped the steel tightly, but after a few seconds he breathed deeply and relaxed. He was letting the weapon become an extension of his body, a skill he had tried to teach me but the metal barrel and oily gun butt always felt like a deadly dance partner against my chest, close and intimate, but never joined.
The shot made me jump. Dad took off walking toward the wood pile to see if he’d made his target and I followed. The four cans remained lined up like fat green soldiers.
“You didn’t really expect to hit anything, did you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Four cans.”
“There were five,” he said, and then continued on in the direction of the house lights.
I opened my mouth to argue, but shut it again. He got about ten yards ahead before I gathered my wits enough to follow. Trotting behind, I could feel the muscles in my ankles resisting the pace I was making them follow. My tendons creaked and my spine jarred as I moved. My experience with death. And funerals. Husbands. Dogs. Mom. A stillborn child. My chest caved in with grief and hollowness. I stopped and leaned forward, my hands on my knees, my breath panting. “Dad. Dad,” I called out to him.
He stopped and turned, observing me with some alarm.
“Dad, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to do it again, not by myself,” I said. I tried to stand upright, but my chest was heaving fast and I felt a little dizzy.
“You can plan the hell out of it, but that still isn’t going to stop it from happening. I’m going to die. Maybe not soon, but,” he waved his free hand uselessly and then let it drop by his side. He slumped forward lower, and I could see the exhaustion on his face even in the darkness. “If it will shut you up, we’ll go to the funeral home and make the arrangements. We’ll pick out the.” He shook his head and stopped. He was staring down at the ground, and I was feeling guilty for making him, my ninety-eight year old father, think about his own mortality, his own impending death. I felt grossly ashamed and selfish, and I stood up straight.
“Dad, let’s just, let’s have pancakes. I’d really rather go out for pancakes,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”
He sighed once more and muttered something I couldn’t make out. Then, resuming his walk, he turned and motioned with the rifle for me to follow him home. “Pancakes,” he said, turning his face a little toward me, and I could see his hunched over head nodding in agreement.
# # #
Cathy Adams’ latest novel, A Body’s Just as Dead, was published by SFK Press. Her short stories have been published in Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Tincture, A River and Sound Review, upstreet, and over forty others internationally. She now lives and writes in Shenyang, China, with her husband, photographer, Julian J. Jackson.
Photo: Casey Allen
[…] Cathy Adams M.M. Adjarian Nicholas Alti Frank Andrick Mark Ashby Maggie Barnard Gaby Bedetti Robert Beveridge Henry Bladon Ashley Lynn Scheffler Bhasin Kelvin C. Bias George J. Blesi Georgia Brawn Alexis Burnett Dr. Jenny Butler Dan Cardoza Kevin Carey Ute Carson Ranjabali Chaudhuri Alan Clark Douglas Cole Felix Rian Constantinescu Jon Davis Holly Day John Doelman John Dorroh Lanny Durbin Khalil Elayan Jay Lee Ellis Thomas Elson Marco Etheridge C. Christine Fair Carolyn Fay Frederick K. Foote, Jr. N.T. Franklin Carolyn Geduld Thomas Genevieve Beth Gordon Dave Gregory Ashleigh Gryzko Alison Hackett Ben Hall Ty Hall Todd Hathaway Adjie Henderson Andrea Holck Nicola Humphreys Veneese Ipler Phebe Jewell Christina Johanningmeier Lianne Kamp Olaf Kroneman ky li Lisa Lopresti Frances Luevano Kilmeny MacMichael Azam Mahmood Jessica Manchester-Sanchez D.S. Maolalai Ellen Marcanto J.C. Mari Anita Markoff Brandon Marlon Bailey Merlin Milt Montague Trevor Moran Keith Moul Mark Mulholland Douglas J. Ogurek Brett Pribble Ryan Priest Kimberly Rivers Carolyn R. Russell Patti Santucci Terry Sanville Gerard Sarnat Morgan Sears Tiffany Shaw-Diaz M.C. Schmidt Kate Shylo Ronnie Sirmans Stacy Smith Sudeep Soparkar Glen Sorestad Dan Soule Claudia M. Stanet Christine Stephens-Krieger Fatima Suliman Charles Talkoff David J. Thompson Pepper Trail Rekha Valliappan Suzanne Verrall Ian Willey Kristi Witt Priyanka Yap Eric Seojun Yoon Maura Yzmore […]