Chapter 89
He did not describe the days that followed in his journal until three weeks later. He needed them to settle first to become something he could think about rather than something he was inside of.
What he wrote, eventually: 'She died in her own room in her own bed at eighty-eight, having done everything she set out to do. Every child she wanted. Every Sunday phone call kept. Every entry written. She arrived at her ending having said everything she needed to say. I know this because she told me, the last Sunday, that she had said it. She was ready in the way very few people are ready not resigned, but complete.'
The funeral was in the church she had attended irregularly but believed in consistently. The yard filled with people the neighborhood she had lived in for sixty years, the sewing clients, the church women, the generations of people whose lives had been shaped by her steadiness.
Leroy was beside Marcus throughout. Not holding him up Marcus was not falling but present, which was what mattered.
Nia held his hand in the pew and he felt the warmth of it and was grateful for thirty years of the kind of love that does not need to perform itself.
He spoke at the funeral. He spoke for ten minutes, which was not long enough and was exactly right. He told the story of the morning she held him for the first time and described his fingers as already reaching for something just out of sight. He told the story of the factory and the notebooks. He told the story of the airport and: I'm proud of you already.
He said: she built a life from the inside out, from the ground up, from exactly what she had, and she made it beautiful and purposeful and full. She was not a woman who asked for more than she had. She was a woman who made everything she had into more than it appeared to be. That is the rarest skill. That is the greatest form of creativity I have ever witnessed.',
He sat down.
Elise, beside him, took his hand.
Joseph, on the other side, put his arm around his father's shoulders.
Marcus sat between his children in the church where his mother's voice had occasionally risen in song, and let the grief be exactly what it was large and clean and the proper price of loving someone completely for sixty-five years.
He wrote in his journal, later: 'She was the soil that held the roots. Everything grew from her. Everything will keep growing. That is what she wanted. That is what she built. The tree does not forget the soil. I will never forget.