UN-TIED: MY FATHER IN HIS COFFIN (2)

I looked down at my father.

Dead people shrink. I know that. But my father had lost so much weight near the end of his life that the coffin he picked seemed far too large, as if he could have used a size or two smaller. He was not wearing his glasses, but I don't think he had worn them much in the last months of his life. He never wore them during my last visit a few weeks before he died. He was tilted at a slight - uncomfortable looking - angle to the right. His hands did not look comfortably crossed on his stomach. They looked stacked and his fingers were straight and stiff. It was not the undertaker's finest work.

He was dressed in his blue suit - the one he described years ago to my wife as his "funeral suit" - and a light blue shirt open at the neck. No tie? My father always wore a tie with his suit. It was like a uniform - and he liked uniforms. Without a tie he looked not only uncomfortable, stiff and dead, he looked unnatural. I didn't like it.

Whose idea was that? I was ready to go find a tie and fit it around his neck the way he did for me when I was a boy and he was teaching me to tie a full Windsor knot. Men in my family thought a tie wasn't worth wearing unless it was tied in a full Windsor knot. No half-Windsors allowed. No clip-ons. A dress-up occasion wasn't a dress-up occasion without a well-knotted tie. And death always was a dress-up occasion. At least it always had been before.

I told my wife it wasn't right. My sister and one of my father's oldest friends were chatting a few feet away. I had to ask.

"Why doesn't he have on a tie?"

"Because he wanted it that way." My sister smiled.

"But why? It's not like him."

"I know," my sister said. She shrugged. "But he said no tie." She said he was very clear about the way he wanted things done at his funeral.

Dad's old friend Libby said my father quit wearing ties a while back. "When he started losing weight he didn't think a tie fit very well. His shirt collar was too loose on his neck. He didn't like the way it looked." Libby said he didn't even wear a tie to his older sister's memorial service a while back. "He liked to look good and he thought he looked better without a tie," she said. "And he refused to buy a new shirt." Of course he did.

Vanity compounded by frugality. That was my father. He would have angrily denied the first but fully embraced the last (the truth is there was more than a little bit of vanity in his frugality as well). He always said he was the best man at every wedding he ever attended. Now he wanted to be the best looking dead man he could be and that meant no tie. Not this time. And no new shirt to be buried in. Such a purchase would be painful to his Great Depression-honed sensibility (those of us who didn't live through the Depression and WWII never quite measured up in his estimation).


He planned it but it still didn't look right to me especially with the flag draped on the coffin. No tie. No flowers. Just the flag. He planned that too because above and beyond all other things in his life, my father was a veteran, sometimes too much a veteran and not enough other things, but that's who he was. And it's what he wanted.

In fact, my father planned his entire funeral in elaborate detail and paid in advance. The coffin, the vault, the clothes, the flag, the music (which had to be changed a bit because the singer couldn't hit the required high notes); he even went to see the minister about the eulogy. The whole thing went off almost without a hitch. There was gunfire and someone played "Taps." It would have been perfect if the gray-haired veteran helping fold the flag hadn't tripped over the burial machinery and nearly knocked over a weathered

old tombstone before he regained his balance, paused, then went on folding. He was embarrassed but unhurt - and the flag never touched the ground, that's important. I could imagine my father grimacing, but that stumble was the one flaw, the one little thing my father couldn't possibly have planned for, the thing that made everything else perfect. The flag was folded, salutes exchanged. My father loved flags and salutes. The flag was handed to my nephew just like my father wanted it. He loved my nephew (who I found out later was wearing my father's missing tie that day). All went as planned.

And without a rehearsal. He had wanted one of those too, just to make sure things were right. He liked to make sure. Practice. Practice. Practice. My sister-in-law said they talked him out of it, but my niece said she could imagine him saying, "I'll lie right here on the sofa and pretend I'm dead." And keep track of the way things were going. She could imagine it because that is precisely who he was. He was a man who wanted to attend his own funeral to make sure it was just the way he envisioned it, just the sort of man who would go to his grave tie-less and confident he was the best man there and let the rest of us go about our business. Even dead and tie-less he was still in charge. 

My father had a long life full of plans, almost always unrehearsed, and flawed by trips, stumbles and falls no matter how hard he practiced. It was the only life he had and he lived it the best he could, all the way to the end. It is the most anybody can do.

If you visit his grave and find a tie on his headstone (with a full-Windsor knot), you will know that I have been there. And it will be one of mine. I hate ties and see no need to wear one ever again. I never thought he would see it my way.
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If you go to my old blog The UnTexan you will find the pieces I wrote around the time of my mother's death in 2006. You can click on the archive for April 2006 or click on the category Mom, Death and Family. There's lots of other stuff on there too. Years of stuff. In fact, click on anything and everything. Enjoy yourself.
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