Page 112 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

Rob paused and finally said, “No, Honeybunch. Your dad is being cremated, and his body hasn’t been prepared. It would be terrible for that to be the last memory you have of him.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I felt desperate in a way I didn’t understand. Rob looked down at me and then turned to leave. I stepped in front of him. “Please, Rob.”
He paused again, then began walking down the hall. “Come on,” he said. “We should go in.”
On Monday, in between the two sessions of the wake, the family went back to the House for lunch. On the way, Donald and Ivana had gone to the supermarket and picked up large quantities of prepackaged cold cuts that Maryanne and Elizabeth laid out on the breakfast room table and we ate or ignored in relative silence.
I had no appetite and wasn’t part of the conversation, so I left the breakfast room to wander around the house, as I’d used to do when I was younger. I walked to the back stairs across from the library doorway and caught a glimpse of Donald holding the telephone in his hand. I don’t know if he had just finished a call or was about to make one, but when he noticed me standing in the hallway, he returned the handset to the cradle. Neither one of us spoke. I hadn’t seen Donald since Mother’s Day, which we had celebrated at North Hills, my grandparents’ country club on Long Island. I didn’t expect tears from anybody except my grandmother, but Donald, and particularly my grandfather, seemed to be taking my dad’s death in stride. “Hey, Donald.”
“What’s up, Honeybunch?” I sometimes wondered if either of my uncles actually knew my name.
“Dad’s going to be cremated, right?” I had known for years that that was what Dad wanted. He had felt so strongly about not being buried that it was one of the first things he had told my mother after they were married. His insistence upon it bordered upon an obsession, which was why I had known about it before I turned ten.
“Right.”
“And then what? He’s not going to be buried, is he?”
A look of impatience crossed his face. It was clear he didn’t want to be
having that conversation. “I think he is.” “You know that makes no sense, right?”