One Last Thing Before I Go

The entire community will come out to comfort his parents, which is what they deserve.
    But who will be there for him?
    Casey, of course. She’ll be there, maybe even shed a tear, he hopes, but the loss will be more theoretical than real, since she lost him years ago, really. Denise will be there, the self-conscious ex-wife, looking much sexier than she needs to. Definitely a low-cut dress and a push-up bra, stiletto heels that will punch small wormholes in the grass around his grave. Will she cry? For Casey, maybe. She’ll stand between Rich and Casey, and they will leave the graveyard a whole family, no longer complicated by the phantom limb that was him.
    Who else? Some of the guys from the band? Maybe. Dana? Depends on how empty her life really is. Do you go to pay respects to the drummer you occasionally hook up with? It’s a judgment call. Jack and Oliver, certainly. Jack will be restless, scanning the crowd for sad, desperate women and saying inappropriate things too loudly while Oliver shushes him, also too loudly. Maybe a few other guys from the building, hoping for a similar courtesy if they too should die before getting their sad lives back on track.
    Everybody dies alone. That’s a fact. Some more alone than others.
    He looks at Mrs. Zeiring. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She loved this fucked-up junkie with her whole heart, breast-fed him, carried him, celebrated his first words, his first steps, overlooked his flaws, wiped his tears, and lived for his smiles. Then something in him broke, something she couldn’t see, and she watched her boy die slow and hard, and probably with a good deal of shouting and nastiness as he went. Her marriage is over, her boy is gone. There was a time when they all lived together, like Denise, Casey, and Silver, a time when she never could have seen this coming. He feels her pain.
    Ruben finishes speaking and nods to the funeral director, who moves forward and flips a switch, and the coffin slowly begins to descend into the grave. The only sound is the small motor of the coffin-lowering device, and that shouldn’t be what Mrs. Zeiring hears as her son is taken away from her. Someone should sing, Silver thinks, and then someone does—a low, somewhat hoarse man’s voice singing “Amazing Grace” quietly but with great sincerity. Ruben’s eyes grow wide, and almost in the same instant that it occurs to Silver that “Amazing Grace” is not sung at Jewish funerals, he recognizes the singing voice as his own.
    But Mrs. Zeiring is looking at him, not with anger or surprise, but a strange half-smile, and he decides that the only thing worse than spontaneously breaking into a Christian hymn at a Jewish funeral while dressed for a wedding would be to not finish it. So he does, slowly, and with feeling, while Mrs. Zeiring closes her eyes and thinks some secret truths to herself, and up at the lectern Silver’s poor father somehow achieves some measure of dignity as he quietly shits a hard square brick.
    * * *
    The sky turns threatening on the drive home. In this heat, quick, random thunderstorms are a daily occurrence.
    “So,” his father says, “what did you think?”
    “I don’t know. What was the desired result?”
    “I’m not going to paint a bull’s-eye for you.”
    “I thought maybe you wanted me to see what it looks like for a parent to bury a child.”
    He scratches his beard thoughtfully. “That would have been petty and manipulative of me, but I won’t rule it out.”
    He sounds weary; not generally, like it’s been a long day, but specifically, like Silver is sapping his energy.
    “Are you mad about the ‘Amazing Grace’ thing?”
    “Of course not,” he says, and even grins a little. “But really, what in the world possessed you?”
    Silver doesn’t really know how to explain it. It’s like he’s been inexpertly rewired. Signals are being mixed, relays being tripped, power surging and waning, and he’s acting on impulses before he knows he’s had them.
    “Me,” he says. “I possessed me.”
    “Some might say it was God.”
    “Yeah, people are always getting us confused. I’m taller.”
    Ruben turns into the driveway of the Versailles, pulls over, and throws the car into park. “I have a plan,” he says.
    “Do you?”
    “You’re going to come with me to one of every life-cycle event I’ve got on my calendar. A bris, a bar or bat mitzvah, a wedding, a death.”
    “And we just covered death.”
    “Right.”
    “OK.”
    He