600 Hours of Edward

my father, and the 306th day of the year (because it is a leap year), we are going to bury him. It is this strange custom that sits in the forefront of my mind when I awake at 7:42 a.m. Why do we bury those who die? Where did that come from?
    I am lucky to live in an age when I can learn the answers to such questions as easily as climbing out of bed and going into the next room. To run the word “death” through an Internet search engine is to traffic in websites and pictures that educate and horrify.
    I learn that we have not advanced so far from the days of the Neanderthals, when it comes to matters of disposing of the dead. They, too, buried the people who expired, and though Neanderthals were crude people, they did not bury carelessly. Bodies were tenderly placed in holes, sometimes in a fetal position, as if returning the person to child form, and sometimes in a recumbent position, presumably for a safe, comfortable trip to wherever the Neanderthals thought their dead were going. What happens to us beyond death is more than my fact-loving mind wishes to contemplate.
    When this land I live in now belonged to the Indians, a body was often left out in the open for birds and scavengers to feast on. The Absarokes would place their dead bodies in trees or on scaffolds, and then they would come along to collect the bones for burial later. If you consider the culture of the Indian, it makes sense. The tribes were and are great stewards of the land and the animals who roam it. They would use every part of a buffalo and honor the animal in the hunt. It makes sense, then, that they would not let their own bodies decay without replenishing nature. I find myself liking the Absarokes’ approach.
    The Egyptians preserved their dead. The Romans and the Greeks burned theirs, a practice that did not catch on here in America until the nineteenth century. Nowadays, cremation is considered an environmentally friendly way of disposing of the dead, rather than taking up acreage in a cemetery. I can only imagine what my father might have said to this option; he detested environmentalists.
    I also learn things I did not want to know about death. I learn about a man named Budd Dwyer, a politician like my father. Budd Dwyer got railroaded in an ethics investigation in Pennsylvania, showed up at a press conference in 1987, made a short speech, and then shot himself on live television. I saw the whole thing on video. I wish I had not.
    Later today, we will bid my father farewell and ask that he rest in peace. I hope he does. I don’t know what the afterlife is, or if there is one—this is a question I don’t ponder long, as it challenges my preference for facts like nothing else. If there is an afterlife, I hope Budd Dwyer, treated so poorly while he was here, is having a good time and will be nice to my father. They were both Republicans. They should get along.
    – • –
    My father was not a religious man, but he saw great political value in going to church. If you belong to the right church in Billings—or anywhere else, I suppose, but I can’t say for sure, as I don’t live anywhere else—you can cut a few business deals while hearing the Good Word.
    In Billings, the church my father chose is First Congregational. Father always said his favorite part of First Church, as it is known, is the rich diversity of its people. Yet when I was a child and a teenager, it wasn’t difficult to realize that the only people he spent much time talking with were the six or seven developers who were also members—all middle-aged, white, rich men.
    Whatever the roots of that longtime association, it explains why today, at 2:05, the Reverend Heron James of First Congregational has stepped forward to deliver the eulogy.
    “Friends, welcome. We are here today to remember and say good-bye to a great man in the history of Billings, one who lifted the city and people he loved to a more prosperous place…”
    My mother and I are sitting side by side, in front of my father’s closed casket. To her left is the ever-present Jay L. Lamb. I turn my head and scan the other faces and see that my mother was not kidding when she said it would be a small gathering: I see the Billings mayor, Kevin Hammel, and one, two, three, four, five city council members, and my father’s two fellow county commissioners, Rolf Eklund and Craig Hashbarger.
    “…Ted Stanton was not a man who would settle for good enough, not when better than ever was so close to our