My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls.
He’s 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he’s alive.
“I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket.” He pats his jeans. “If you’re wrong, I’ll dig my way out.”
My brothers laugh at his punchline. My mom rolls her eyes. I tilt my head like his beagle. A man who’s always worked with his hands is trying to use his mouth to tell us he feels the end coming, and he’s afraid it’s being shut in the dark, cold for eternity.
I want to pat his head, but I don’t know how to tell him what I think I know.
Death is not an experience. Would that mean anything to him, or be hollow, like my sharing lyrics to a song he’s never heard?
Afraid of sounding like a holier-than-thou nitwit, I keep quiet.
* * *
He dies two weeks after Thanksgiving, and my mom fights me in the funeral home.
“He never wore Carhartt’s.”
I want to hit her over the head with the clawhammer I’ve brought and bury her in his place.
“He’s wearing them today.” I slip the hammer into the brown pocket on his right side.
After he’s in the ground, I feel cheated, like he died as soon as I’d learned enough to tell him something important.
* * *
A day after the funeral, Mom calls and says I’m not acting right. I haven’t been sleeping.
“Be careful, baby girl. You got a family tree full of lunatics. Your granddaddy claimed he seen green little men.”
Mom likes to pretend people are crazy to control them, so I end the call.
I’m not crazy. Neither was my dad’s dad, who did see green little men. He had narcolepsy. I Google narcolepsy and confirm that hallucinating is a symptom. Grandpa’s brain was misfiring.
There is a genetic component.
What if Dad was only asleep yesterday in his casket? Maybe we buried him too soon.
My eyeballs burn from too much air. I close them, but in the dark, I become him and feel his chest shaking when his eyes snap open underground into black silence.
What if he can’t reach the hammer?
* * *
Hours later, I’m in bed with sweaty sheets pulled to my chin. I’m shaking in that uncontrollable way I find so embarrassing. Last time it happened was during an IT meeting at work. My nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a bear and a cranky dev, or between dying and grief.
I know he’s not buried alive.
Who is this I? How do you know that you know?
But my body doesn’t know. My body won’t be still. My body needs to see.
Whose body?
* * *
I have shovels in the shed. That’s the problem. If I had no shovels, I could stay home. But I have shovels, and so my body — Whose body? Who are you in there? — has to dig.
Dad never went to Mom’s Wesleyan Methodist church, but she buried him in the graveyard beside it anyway. I drive there in minutes.
I was raised in this church. I learned how a preacher gives you chills before I learned about the science of mass hysteria. I went to bible school before I went to college for what my dad called computers. I hid in the pew the night they turned off all the lights, cranked the furnace, and had adults wailing in the vestibule so us kids could get a taste of hell.
The Wesleyan Methodists are too serious.
That’s why I love Zen. Zen isn’t serious. I decide if I dig my dad up and he’s alive, I’ll teach him Zen and see if he wants to burn down the serious church.
I leave my headlights on, pointed at the fresh grave. He doesn’t have a headstone yet. Good.
I get my shovel from the trunk and start to dig.
My back hurts, but I’m lucky the ground isn’t frozen. Cold and sweaty, I tell myself Dad would be impressed with all this manual labor. The pile of dirt behind me grows, and I have to step down, farther and farther into the hole, to dig deeper.
I’m inside my dad’s grave. Lunatic. Hank Williams, Jr.’s Family Tradition plays like a soundtrack. I laugh until I’m dizzy. I dig faster. I fall and get back up.
There’s a vibration in my wrist when the shovel hits his casket.
* * *
Examining the wooden box for signs of escape by clawhammer, I yell, “You in there? Make some noise!”
I kick the side and listen. My car’s engine sounds like wind from down here.
With numb fingers, I pry at the lid. Too heavy. There’s still too much dirt. I sweep with my palms, pressing my ear down between swipes, listening for scraping.
But I can’t hear him in there, because I’m screaming too loudly out here.
“Dad! Dad! Dad!”
I holler the word again and again, so that Dad is a noise, like my car’s engine, which is a very different noise than saying the words my car’s engine, out loud, just like the word Dad, out loud, is very different from the Appalachian sound the man who raised me made.
The word is not the experience. Death is not an experience. Try to eat the word cake. Try to talk to a corpse.
My body collapses. I remember now. He’s not in there, because he’s in that eternal place deep inside where wind blows without a name.
Dying is going to sleep and never waking up. Getting born is waking up after never having gone to sleep. He doesn’t have to be afraid.
Those are the lyrics I wanted to share, but he already knows.
* * *
b. 1942 – d. 2024: I am not in here.