There wasn’t supposed to be any funeral. He didn’t want a funeral, but my sister-in-law had planned a memorial service at my mother’s house anyway, and, while I couldn’t get a read on my mother’s feelings about it, I knew my father would have hated it, just as I knew that he would have humored my sister-in-law because, he would have said, sometimes it’s not about the truth. Sometimes it’s about kindness. Especially when it comes to family. That’s what he’d said to me a few years before he died, not like it was a profound truth or anything, but like fishing advice, like, Wait till the end of your cast to snap your wrist. He’d made the remark on New Year’s Eve. My brother had just called to make amends for punching me in the face the summer before. I’d been drunk that summer, drunk when he’d hit me, so I’d had it coming, I’m sure, but by New Year’s Eve I’d gotten sober, and everyone was cautiously optimistic. It was my first sober New Year’s, and I was in Arizona visiting our parents when my brother called, drunk, to make amends and tell me he was proud of me for getting sober. I said OK and thanks and I loved him too and so on, and then I went out to the living room and found my father still up. He’d gone to bed early, but he was up again, said he never could get much sleep anymore. He was watching some kind of cop movie with people shooting each other and beating each other’s faces bloody, and I told him about the call and how it was funny, my brother being drunk, telling me he was proud of me for being sober, and my father said I’d done the right thing, being gracious. His own brother was dumb as a post, he said, referring to my uncle Ray, my favorite uncle, a stoner fuckup who’d once been a musical prodigy but was now, as my father said, dumb as a post, always calling up drunk to say one stupid thing or another, to complain about his life or make crass jokes, trying to feel connected to someone, and you just had to listen to him and say, Yeah, I know, things are tough, and laugh at his jokes as though you hadn’t heard them a thousand times, because sometimes, like my father said, it wasn’t about the truth. Sometimes it was about being kind. And because my father had said that, I knew he would have told me to be gracious about the memorial service, even though he’d never wanted a funeral of any kind, least of all a pagan funeral with candles and mealymouthed speeches like the one my sister-in-law had planned. The night before the event we were having dinner with my mother at the house in Arizona — my wife, my sister-in-law, my brother, and me — and my sister-in-law was explaining how the service would go, who would say what and when, and she asked my wife, my Mormon wife, if she wanted to say something during this pagan funeral, and before my wife could say anything, I told her she didn’t have to. There’s no reason you gotta take part in this circus, I said, without realizing that this would be an insult to my sister-in-law, that describing the thing as a circus was the same as shitting all over it. I was just trying to protect my wife, who was still relatively new to the family and not accustomed to our eccentricities. I worried that it would infringe on her religious beliefs to participate in a pagan funeral. That’s why I said it. Unless, of course, I said it because I did, in fact, think it was a circus, and here at the table I had the opportunity to let everyone know. Bad business, that, but my wife said she would sing, so that night we practiced. I played the guitar and she sang “On Eagle’s Wings,” a song I’d picked because I’d heard it at my grandmother’s funeral, and my grandmother was Catholic, and when my father went to the hospital and they asked him for his religious preference, he said, Catholic, and they sent a Catholic priest and my father sent him away, saying, No, no. I’m not Catholic. I prefer Catholics. My wife is Catholic. My kids are Catholic, he said, even though in truth neither my brother nor I had practiced for years. That was, in fact, why my father had told me it was OK — good, even — to marry a Mormon, in spite of my Catholic mother’s objections. Your kids won’t be Mormon, he said. They’ll grow out of it the same way you guys grew out of Catholicism. But it’ll give them some kind of moral foundation. That shit is difficult to teach without religion, he said, and that’s why he was concerned about my niece, my brother’s daughter, because she was being raised without religion, as far as he could tell, and therefore without morals. So my wife and I practiced our song. She sang, He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, and I played guitar, and we had it more or less nailed by the time people started coming over for the memorial the next day. But how was it, I wondered, that my sister-in-law’s face had remained blank when I’d called the whole affair a circus? How was it that, at the dinner table, after my brother had cleared his plate and it was just the four of us — my wife, my sister-in-law, my mother, and me — how was it that she’d been so unaffected? Only my wife had said something. Dewey, she’d said, Hannah’s gone to all this trouble to plan a memorial for your father, and you just called it a circus, and before I could even finish saying I hadn’t meant it that way, Hannah cut me off, saying that it was all right. Of course it was all right, I thought. My father was dead. But still, you have to admit that she was awfully kind. Awfully. It was a kindness I almost hated, because what I’d said must have stung, and yet she hadn’t even blinked, and the next morning everything was in place.