Page 114 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

honesty but also felt jealous that he seemed to have so many more good memories of my father than I did.
As the wake drew to a close, I watched as people began to line up, walk past the coffin, pause with eyes closed, hands clasped—sometimes kneeling on a low cushioned bench that seemed to have been put there for the purpose—and then move on.
When my aunt Elizabeth’s turn came, she began to sob uncontrollably. In the midst of all that stoicism, her display of emotion was jarring, and people looked at her with muted alarm. But no one approached her. She placed her hands on the coffin and slid to her knees. Her body was shaking so badly that she lost her balance and fell sideways to the floor. I watched her fall. She lay there as if she had no idea where she was or what she was doing and continued to cry. Donald and Robert finally came from the back of the room, where they’d been talking to my grandfather, who stayed where he was.
My uncles lifted Elizabeth from the floor. She limped between them as they pulled her from the room.
I approached the coffin eventually, tentatively. It seemed impossibly small, and I thought that there must have been a mistake. There was no way my father, at six feet two, could have fit inside that box. I ignored the bench and remained on my feet. I bowed my head, concentrating hard on one of the coffin’s brass fixtures. Nothing came to me.
“Hi, Dad,” I finally said under my breath. I wracked my brains as I stood there looking down, until it occurred to me that I might be standing at the wrong end of the coffin, that the conversation I was trying to have with my father was being directed at his feet. Mortified, I took a step back and returned to my friends.
There was no church ceremony. The coffin was transferred to the crematorium, and we met briefly in the chapel next door—oddly sun- drenched and bright—where a minister of no specified denomination demonstrated both his utter lack of knowledge of my father and the fact that nobody in the family had bothered to educate him about the man he was soon to consign to the flames.
When the business of the funeral was complete, the family planned to take a drive to the All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village where the family plot was; my grandfather’s parents, Friedrich and Elizabeth Trump, were the only occupants at the time. I later learned that over the preceding two