Finding Mercy in an Omelet
The memorial was held in the utility room of a high desert town hall, which sounds less like a place to mourn the dead than to pay a parking ticket. The room had the municipal melancholy peculiar to inland California: fluorescent lighting, folding chairs, beige walls that gave up decades earlier. At the front stood a plexiglass podium with yellow flowers around it. Yellow flowers are what happens when potential runs out of time.
There was food, technically. But dessert was clearly the priority. Chocolate marble pound cake, brownies, sheet cake, layer cake, chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate-chip cookies dipped in dark and white chocolate, and several other sweets whose principal aim seemed to be disguising future regret. Grief, with a side of diabetes.
The deceased had lived a life of almost exhausting disappointment. Drugs, booze, infidelity, rage, intermittent work as a bit actor, the full inventory of male self-sabotage. He had hurt people. Repeatedly. He was, by most measurable standards, a catastrophe with a head shot.
His children didn’t see it that way. Not sentimentally. Worse than that, convincingly.
They remembered birthdays, school plays, soccer games, and his favorite Mexican restaurant after every event. They eulogized breakfasts. Vast, unnecessary breakfasts at grandpa’s house. Pancakes, bacon, eggs, hash brown potatoes, toast, sausage, orange juice from concentrate — the sort of meals cooked by a man who only knew how to apologize with butterfat. Ordinary things.
Not the affairs or the arrests. The omelets.
I arrived ready to judge a failed life and left wondering if presence is greater than virtue.
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