One Last Thing Before I Go

King Saul on Mount Gilboa. You remember that story?”
    “He fell on his sword. They were losing to the Philistines. He knew what would happen to him when he was captured.”
    Ruben smiles, clearly happy that Silver has retained some element of Jewish knowledge. When they were little, every Friday night Silver and Chuck would walk home from temple, holding their father’s hands. And as they hopped and zigzagged to avoid any sidewalk cracks, he would tell them a story from the Bible, a different one each time. Silver favored the miracles—the splitting of seas, manna from heaven, water from rocks, the ten plagues. Chuck loved the battles. It was either a testament to Ruben’s storytelling skills or simply a function of the Bible’s aesthetic that he could usually incorporate both.
    “That’s right,” he says, now in full rabbinic mode. “The sages used Saul’s suicide as a qualification, a separate status. If there were mitigating circumstances that distressed a person, then the rabbis could take a more lenient approach.”
    “And you can apply that to pretty much every suicide.”
    “That’s true. I think that was the point.”
    “A loophole,” Silver says. “Nice.”
    “Compassion,” Ruben says.
    “You say tomato . . .”
    His father shakes his head, frowning. This is why they don’t discuss religion. “The point I’m trying to make is that suicide is, both morally and spiritually, a very tricky area. Forget religion, forget God, for that matter.”
    “Done.”
    Ruben flashes him an annoyed glance. “This is serious.”
    “Sorry. I know.”
    “You have a family. You have a daughter. And regardless of how lousy things have been, Casey is still quite young. You have a lifetime to be the father you want to be to her. To be the person you meant to become before . . .” His voice trails off. This is the closest he has ever come to acknowledging his view of Silver’s life.
    “Before what, Dad?”
    “Before you got lost.”
    Silver wants to get angry, but the anger won’t come. Instead, he finds himself fighting back tears. “I don’t know what happened,” he says weakly.
    Ruben nods and pats his knee. Silver sees the age spots and wrinkles on his father’s hand. We’re all aging, he thinks, coming apart cell by cell at an alarming rate.
    “Cheer up,” Ruben says brightly as they turn into the cemetery. “We’re here.”
    “Yeah, about this. Why are we here? I didn’t know this guy.”
    “How do you think I feel? I have to give the eulogy.”
    “That is rough.”
    Ruben shrugs. “Could be worse.” He looks over at me. “I could be wearing a tuxedo from the eighties.”
    Silver laughs. They both do. They have the same laugh.
    * * *
    Eric Zeiring was twenty-eight years old and lived alone in some shithole in Brooklyn until he died of a drug overdose. No one tells Silver this, but he infers it from the things people are not saying, from the way everyone who speaks is carefully couching their words. His father makes reference to Eric’s struggles, to his parents’ unwavering love and numerous attempts to help him. To the elusive peace he has now finally found.
    A single, enormous white cloud unfurls out across the sky with enough texture to see any shape you’d like: a woman’s boots, a weeping clown, Sigmund Freud in profile. It’s a small funeral, maybe thirty people gathered graveside, mostly friends of Eric’s mother. Eric’s father, balding and featureless, stands off to the side, looking impatient and out of place. Silver’s guess is they’ve been divorced long enough to be strangers. Eric’s mother, petite and pretty, weeps and nods emphatically at everything Ruben says. He talks about Eric’s mop of curly blond hair that made him look like a cherub when he was a boy, about how Eric loved to visit his nana in Key Biscayne, about what an athlete he was. He evokes the boy Eric was for his parents, to help them forget about the sorry man he became. No parent should ever bury a child, Ruben says.
    It makes Silver wonder about his own funeral.
    Because pretty soon, in a matter of days or weeks, his father will have to bury him. And maybe no parent should bury their child, but it’s really a question of value. His father has a wife, another son, grandchildren, and people like the Zeirings who count on him for comfort and perspective, to put a spiritual spin on things when the darkness invades their ordered lives. His funeral will be crowded, but not with his people.