Recalling the day, I remember staring at the change on my dresser top, scattered pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters surrounding an oddly placed shoe horn. I remember staring at the cuts, fades and blemishes of my black leather wallet. Feeling stone cold drunk although I hadn’t taken a drink. Dizzy, constant somersault dizzy. My eyes watering, burning, cutting an onion burning and tunnel vision too. A general inability to focus or think or react adequately to my name being called or the sun in my eyes. My son was dead and I stood zombie like staring out my bedroom window at nothing, shoving loose change into my chino pockets.

His mother had called at five thirty that morning, the morning of my only son’s, my only child’s funeral. She called again at six and again at six thirty. She was rambling about the weather and how we never encouraged him to go to college, about her car needing an oil change. She wondered if I was going to wear ‘that stupid brown suit that you should have thrown out twenty years ago.’ I didn’t reply to any of it and it didn’t matter. My ex wife of twenty years just needed to say things, anything, purge her brain, her heart, her mouth, her soul; hear herself talk until she was tired of the effort. She had done this since the very first minute I met her. But at that moment, I understood. At that moment she had every right to try in vain to blather the pain away.

At seven o’clock that morning the phone rang again, but I chose not to answer it. Any more inane chatter would have just incited me to drink, and I wanted to be dignified. I wanted to comport myself like a grown man. I didn’t want to appear wounded or beaten. There would be people there, at the funeral, that expected more of me. I wanted to disappoint no one. I wanted to stand erect, six feet, one half inch tall, one hundred and ninety two pounds of navy blue cotton suit wearing man. Thin brown hair parted to my right, hair sprayed stiff and neat. Face shaven, rinsed with scalding hot water and shaved again. Shoes shined. Socks clean. Thoughts clear. Memories temporarily abandoned. Sentiment left with the morning paper on the front step of my porch. I would be dignified, displaying to the world where my son learned his resolve. I would stand before family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers not as a grieving man, but simply a man.

On my way to breakfast with a pocket full of loose change, behind the wheel of a four door sedan with the attention span of an infant beetle, I retreated to a pocket of my brain that I had not dug through in many years. I remembered Chad’s first little league game. That is, was, my son’s name, Chad. He was scared to death of the baseball. Fielding it on the ground, fielding it from the air and most notably hitting the ball, scared the crap out of him. But unlike other boys, he was never afraid to admit this to me. We had conversation on top of conversation about the impending first game and how he was frightened to death that he wouldn’t do well. I remember being surprised and impressed by his candor. He was seven years old then. I would learn over time that my son was full of surprises. That was one of the more remarkable things about my son. Regardless of how well you knew him, he continued to surprise and delightfully so.

"Johnny McDougal throws pretty hard in practice Dad," he had said. "I can never get my bat on the ball when he’s pitching. Not even a foul ball or anything."

"Just keep practicing hard Chad," I’d said, "you’re getting better. I’ve got a lot of faith in you boy."

"I just don’t want to, you know, embar…embar," he stuttered.

"Chad, you’re not going to embarrass yourself. You’re a competitor. And don’t worry about the other kids. You’ll see, you’ll be fine."

"But Dad, I don’t want to embarrass you. I want you to be proud of me."

That night, after I put my son to sleep, I cried. Chad always worried about how other people felt, about their comfort level, even at seven years old. This would not go away as he got older. Chad would continue to put other people in his life first, no matter what.

I always eat at the same restaurant in the morning before I go to work and the day of my only son’s funeral was no exception. Tiernay’s restaurant serves strong coffee, crisp bacon and fresh juice. The waitresses for the most part keep up on their sports and politics, so I don’t have to sit in silence if I don’t want to. There is activity during the week this early, seven forty five, but not so much where there is constant door slamming, order calling and dish clattering. It’s quaint, friendly, affordable and welcoming. That’s why I eat breakfast there, simply enough.

"Martin," my waitress, Eva, mother of three boys including a prep high school basketball star named Travis, began, "the girls and I wanted to give you this."

In front of Eva’s waist, was a flower arrangement so elaborate and plentiful that she had to hold it with two hands. Yellows and reds and violets and greens. I could smell them from two feet away. There was a card attached to the pot.

"I don’t know what to say. I haven’t been able to, you know, articulate things very well the past couple of days. Thank you very, very much."

"Mr. Tiernay said breakfast is on the house today. In memory of your son. Mr. Tiernay called him a true war hero. I just wish…" Eva trailed off.

"Thank you," I said again.

I ate my eggs, bacon and toast slowly. I drank too many cups of coffee. I felt my heart racing and I didn’t taste a thing. All I could do was stare at the damn flowers and wish they were on somebody else’s table. I wanted someone else’s meal to be on the house. Quite frankly I didn’t give a damn about what Mr. Tiernay thought about my son. I dipped my white breakfast napkin in a glass of cold water and I rubbed my eyes and forehead and cheeks with it. I tipped the waitress five dollars in quarters.

When I returned to the car, I dialed my ex wife’s phone number from my cellular phone. I was losing my grip a little bit as I remember it and I wanted her shrill voice to bring me back to stark reality quickly. Without saying hello (blessed is the advent of caller identification) she began a mean spirited tirade that I endured for a time; long enough to snap me out of my funk and then I hung up. Her voice was like an arctic wind, just what I needed at the time.

Myra and I divorced when Chad was ten years old. Nothing sordid as far as the impetus of our relationship’s demise, just boredom and indifference and apathy. Myra felt as though she missed her calling to be an artist; instead being saddled with the burden of a respectable, providing husband and a glorious, intelligent, handsome young son. She insisted that we respect her wishes to travel, to seek ‘rhythm, substance and inspiration’ as she so eloquently put that baloney. I worked hard, sixty hours a week as a foreman at the mill, getting dirty, sweating, earning. I provided for my family and doted on my wife when I thought she might need it. I was not romantic. I simply wanted a family, a team, a partner to mother my son. She felt that we stifled her, that she was not living life to the fullest. Dreams unrealized, she said. So we parted. Myra off to a school in Italy to learn how to paint, me off to the boss’ office to ask for fewer hours at work so I had more time for my son. That is the reason I could never hate Myra, despite the abandonment issues she bestowed upon Chad and I. She left me with my son. That was her gift. Strangely, I think she knew that I wouldn’t be devastated, as long as Chad was with me. She often said that Chad was the only reason I married her, although we had him two years after we were married. She said it was like I knew Chad the minute I met Myra. That I saw a son in her eyes, the possibility of creation in her gaze, the likelihood of a heroic son in her touch. It was her words that drew me to her and it was her words that made me suggest she give the eulogy at our only son’s funeral over twenty years later. She refused.

"I can’t do that," she said, "it would be ridiculous."

"What on earth are you talking about?" I asked loudly. "You are better with the language than I ever was and he was your son for God’s sake."

"I gave birth to him and I loved him and he was beautiful," she said. "But he was your son."

That was all it took. To this day there is a small part of me that still loves her for those words.

When I returned from breakfast, I got to my front door and realized I had left my car running. My neighbor noticed and our eyes met and he gave me a sorrowful glance and a half wave.

"See ya in a few hours pal," my neighbor said. "We’d be more than happy to drive you there."

I should have taken him up on his offer. I had blown two red lights and a stop sign on the way to breakfast.

"I feel well," I said, "thanks anyway."

I opened my front door and immediately started disrobing, one article of clothing after another, until I was naked standing in front of the kitchen sink. I turned on the cold water and placed my head underneath the faucet. I don’t think I moved for a while.

When Chad was fifteen years old, him and two friends won a trip to Spain, sponsored by his school Spanish club and some local businesses. He was elated. He had never traveled abroad before and one of the other kids going on the trip was his best friend from the sophomore baseball team. Incidentally, my son was the starting third baseman on that team. Anyway, as it turns out, there was a kid in the school whose grandmother lived in Spain and was ill at the time that Chad had won the trip. He didn’t know the kid, not at all, he wasn’t a baseball player or in any of Chad’s classes, but Chad found out through the grapevine about this fella’s grandma. Two weeks later, Jimmy somethingorother was on a trip to Spain and Chad and I were at a university baseball camp, my treat for his citizenship and generosity. That was my son, an obituary story I know, the All American kid dies sure, but it’s true. He was living, breathing sunshine.

I stood in front of my closet thumbing a new navy blue suit that I had purchased for this occasion. It was overpriced, but I didn’t care. Money doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. I stood in front of my closet, naked, dripping from the cold water from the kitchen sink, staring at this suit, wishing it were on fire. I pictured the suit on the rack where I found it and me walking past it without a glance. I envisioned a scenario where I’d have no need for a stinking navy blue suit. I imagined telling the clerk that sold me the suit that I had the receipt and he could take it back. I didn’t need it anymore. My son wasn’t dead with a bullet in his brain anymore.

I showered for a long time. I alternated between scalding hot water and freezing cold water. I didn’t flinch, the extremes didn’t faze me. I just wanted to stay in the moment and realize where I was at all times. I didn’t want to get nostalgic. I didn’t want to open the scrapbook in the dark attic of my brain. I wanted to feel hot and cold. I wanted to eat until I was full, drink coffee until my heart raced, drink whiskey until I got drunk and fall asleep for three years. I wanted to give a eulogy for my son on a different planet in a different galaxy, during a different era, when Chad wasn’t Chad and I wasn’t me. I wanted to wake up from this dream and curse the God who allowed me to have it. I wanted to remember who I had wronged so badly in days, weeks, months and years passed, that as reciprocation my only son was gunned down in some foreign country, alone, with baseball card stats on his tongue and red baseball seams at the fingertips of his left hand. That’s right, my son was a southpaw; he threw a baseball like Fred Astaire danced and Billie Holiday sang. Classic. Wonderful.

I dressed in this navy blue suit, clean socks and shined shoes and I felt awkward. I looked in the mirror and it wasn’t me in the reflection. I touched my head, my ears, my nose, my eyes, my Adam’s apple, my chin. I twirled around. I looked down a couple times at my shining shoes. I spoke, an entire sentence, but I don’t remember what I said. I spit at the mirror and I saw the dad in me die. I punched the mirror and I saw the dad in me die. I screamed ‘why the hell are you doing this to me’ and I felt the dad in me die. I composed myself and took a deep, deep breath. I exhaled and stared into a cracked mirror at a dead father.

I washed the blood from my hands and looked into the bathroom mirror this time. I promised myself it would not meet the same fate as the bedroom mirror. I slumped my shoulders and cracked a smile and allowed myself to remember.

Chad enlisted in the Army two weeks after graduating from high school. He was a solid ‘B’ student and could have gone to college on me, but he said he owed it to his country to give the Army a try. He was that loose about it, like it was a weekend boy scout trip. He wanted me to take the money I saved for his college education and ‘blow it on a baseball trip.’ He told me to go to every baseball stadium in the country. To buy him a pennant from every park and tell him which place had the best hot dogs and the coldest beer. He told me to save some of the money so I could visit him overseas in the event he was ever stationed abroad. He was excited about enlisting, excited about having something to prove to himself, to me, to his country. He loved the colors of the American flag, he said. He wanted to know what it was like to honor that flag first hand. That was the character my son possessed. Others first, worry about Chad later.

I drove to the graveyard slowly and deliberately. I remember a couple of cars beeping at me and a young man about Chad’s age, yelling at me out the window, calling me ‘an old man’. It stung a little, the remark. I tightened my grip on the wheel and continued to drive slowly, cursing that damn anti-Chad kid.

I parked in the farthest parking space from his grave site as I could, so I could enjoy my first cigarette in two years. I wanted it to last forever. I needed to feel the smoke in my lungs and smell it under my nose and touch it between my thumb and forefinger forever. I smoked two on the way to my son’s grave. They tasted full and rich and I’m smoking again. They keep me company and they calm my nerves. Myra has told me they’re killing me and I say you’ve got to be joking. Most of me is dead anyway. Myra knows this and has since not mentioned the smoking when we meet.

I remember standing in front of my only son’s coffin, shaking hands with people that mumbled things I don’t remember. Women hugged me, held my hands longer than people normally do under less adverse circumstances. I smelled tears and flowers and grass. The sun was shining fiercely. The wood of my son’s coffin was a dark, rich brown, like Tiernay’s strong coffee. A good crowd gathered. I saw my own father walking toward me, just moments before I began to speak on the life and times of my beautiful son. He extended his big hand, it was shaking before I shook it.

"Remain calm son," he said, "he can hear you I’m sure." Prophetic I thought. All these wise, insightful people surrounding me as I prepare to put my only son’s lifeless body in the dirt. Words appreciated and wasted. Comfort is lost. Comfort is gone.

The crowd’s stirring slowed and eventually ended. The reverend said a couple of kind, religious things. I had notified my son’s company about not wanting a military man to speak on my son’s behalf. I had told them to keep their American flag hanging from an elementary school flagpole, not draped on my son’s coffin. Lastly, I mentioned to them there would be no gun salute of any kind. My son had not asked for it and I didn’t want it. He was a hero to them for different reasons than he was a hero to me.

I trembled hard and spoke.

"I am here today to put my son to rest. I will be brief, because he would not have me sing his praises if he were alive, so I will certainly not do it in his death. He was a miracle, born on a Monday, December 2^nd. He was handsome from the beginning. He was a smart boy. He cared about people. He wanted people to be happy. I am simple speaking, I’m sorry. I wish I could be more eloquent before I put my son in the ground. I wish I could convey what I’m feeling, how much he meant to me. But I’m upset, because I shouldn’t be here. I should be telling him all these things as he breathes next to me, telling me to be quiet. Asking me to go to a baseball game. Predicting flawlessly who would hit a home run that particular day. But I am escaping my boundaries now, I am showing emotion that belongs to me. I loved my son. He was amazing. Somebody I don’t know killed him in a country I’ve never been to and I wasn’t there to save him. He bled to death alone, without his father to make things right. These soldiers here today, who I respect, call him a hero, say I should be proud. But I knew these things many years before he joined the Army, years before he left to fight a war I don’t understand. ‘I’m making a difference Dad,’ he said to me before he left. In that strong voice of his. He assured me he’d be OK, but how would he know that? Now he’s gone. My son. My heart. My breath. My soul. My hero. My boy. God, he's really gone and I loved him. I love him. And I’m bitter today, yes. The reason for my life is no longer with me. I am a shell. Sometimes, the last couple of evenings, I’ve awakened to these words out of my mouth. Comeback, I say. Comeback."

With that, I’m told for I have no recollection, I took two heaving gasps and fell on my ass. I rolled on the ground in the grass and dirt for a few moments, crying in the fetal position, yelling ‘comeback, comeback.’

At breakfast, a few hours before the funeral of my only son, the waitress gave me flowers and a card. I never read the card, but my ex wife did. It read ‘May the pain and sorrow you are feeling today, turn to fondness and warmth in the memories of your loved one’s full life.’ It was signed ‘Our hearts are with you.’ I thought those words were appropriate from people that didn’t know Chad very well. But for those lucky enough to have known him well, words can’t describe what he meant to us. If I had to struggle though and summarize what he meant to me, it would just come out like this.

Everything.