I scrambled out of the tub, grabbing a towel and running into the hotel room. My phone was lit up and buzzing its way across the end table.
Please let this be the answer to my prayer.
Please let this be Poppy.
Please, Lord. Please please please.
But the moment I saw the 816 area code, I knew it wasn’t Poppy. My heart—which had been pounding like mad, full of hope and energy and nervousness—flopped down to somewhere in my stomach.
Even though it was an unfamiliar number, I still made myself answer.
“Hello?”
A pause. “Is this Tyler Bell?”
I scrubbed my face with the towel while I answered. “Yes. How can I help?”
“I’m Sarah Russell, Mildred Gustaferson’s daughter.”
I let the towel fall away from my face. “Millie? Is everything okay?”
Sarah didn’t answer right away, but when she did, she was obviously fighting back tears. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. My mother died this morning.”
I flew to Kansas City alone.
I’d broken my self-enforced phone fast and called Poppy. She hadn’t answered. I’d left a voicemail and sent a text, and then I’d driven to our house before I went to the airport, hoping to catch her there, knowing that she would want to know about Millie.
She hadn’t been home.
And so I was alone on the plane, my eyes pressed tightly shut, as if I could keep the tears from falling that way. But they still managed to leak out, slowly and ceaselessly, hot tracks of grief and isolation against my cheeks. I felt so hollow and yet so full, so blank and yet so scrawled upon by events outside my control. My good friend dying, my wife’s absence, this ridiculous distance between me and all the people I cared about. Nothing felt real, nothing felt intimate or close or true—it all seemed like a terrible movie of my life that I was being forced to watch from hundreds of feet away.
When I stared out the airplane window, my reflection superimposed against the velvet night outside, I barely recognized the unshaven man there. Who was he? Where was he going? And why was he going there alone?
The questions were too painful. I shut the shade for the window and leaned back, closing my eyes again, hoping to keep back a fresh wave of tears.
The priest in me wanted to meditate right now. He wanted to pray. He wanted to think of the right things to say to Millie’s children when he went to the funeral, and he wanted to have the right verses ready in his mind in case they were needed.
But the other me—the guy who was Just Tyler—wanted to do nothing at all, except maybe flag the stewardess for a drink. He wanted to think about nothing, feel nothing, say nothing, and do you know what?
That’s exactly what he did.
“Your tie is crooked.”
I turned back to my brother’s bedroom mirror. “It is not!”
Sean huffed impatiently. “The knot is crooked. Hang on.”
I let him fiddle with my tie some more, my thoughts elsewhere. Well, on one thing in particular. Poppy still hadn’t called me back. She wasn’t here and she hadn’t called or texted and I had no idea still if she even knew about Millie. And since it was the day of the funeral, I’d given up on the faint but unflagging hope that she’d fly out here to be with me.
“There,” Sean said, stepping back and gazing at the Windsor knot he’d just made with a critical eye. “Better.”
Sean himself looked every inch the impeccable mourner, his tailored black suit and his Charvet tie screaming money and power. Since I’d left the clergy four years ago, he’d risen to the top of his investment firm, which had in turn become one of the biggest Midwestern firms in America, handling massive agricultural and livestock accounts, along with the private accounts of several Midwestern professional athletes. We were probably as different as two brothers could be—me, the priest-turned-scholar, and him, the millionaire playboy who only went to Mass when someone died—but we looked like a matching set in our black suits. His hair was a dark blond to my brown and his eyes were a blue to my green, but we shared the same high cheekbones and square jaw, the same mouth that maybe smiled a little too widely, the same dimples that dug into our cheeks when that wide smile did appear.
And for all that he was a shallow, self-obsessed asshole, he had genuinely cared about Millie. She’d sent him cookies every month since I’d moved to her parish, and he’d adopted her as a sort-of grandma slash financial advisor, bringing his iPad full of business proposals for her to run through whenever he’d visited her. Aiden, our younger brother, had cared about her too, but he was on a business trip in Brussels and couldn’t make it back for her funeral.
“So,” Sean said as we walked into the elevator down to where his Audi waited. “Where’s your fucking wife, TinkerBell?”
It was like simultaneous shots of rubbing alcohol and laughing gas. For a moment, irritation and raw hurt blinded me…and then I couldn’t help but laugh. Mom and Dad, and even my teenaged brother Ryan, sensed it was a delicate subject for me and so had danced around Poppy’s absence like one would dance around a live grenade. But Sean—Sean gave no fucks about anybody else’s feelings, and hadn’t since our sister had hung herself in our parents’ garage all those years ago. It was the best and worst thing about him, and right now, it was exactly what I needed.
“I think she is really angry with me,” I said. The elevator got to the parking garage level and we walked towards Sean’s car. “I think…I think we might not be together any more.”
Sean looked at me. It wasn’t a look of pity or concern, necessarily, but a look of understanding. A look of even if we don’t talk, even if we don’t share our adult lives together, I’m still here for you. I guess that was the thing about brothers. We shared something that couldn’t be artificially minted or molted away, a bond that would stick for as long as we were both alive.
“You know,” Sean said slowly, looking at me over the hood of the car, “if you need anything or—like—to talk, I’m here.”
Gratitude and affection for my asshole brother flooded me. I knew those words didn’t come naturally or easily to him. “Thanks, Sean. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
He nodded and then got in the Audi. The matter was settled, and it was time to hit the road. Millie had wanted her last rites at St. Margaret’s, the parish she’d given so much of her life to, and that meant a drive to Weston from Kansas City, which was about an hour long.
When we got to St. Margaret’s, we parked the car and Sean went inside to find Mom. I made the excuse that I wanted to walk around and see the new rectory, but really I just needed a moment alone. I poked and prodded at the empty hole in my chest, the place where my wife had lived and then slid out of, like a snake sliding out of its old skin. And I also prodded the thick cloud of grief hovering in my mind, the cloud made of homemade casseroles and long phone calls and hours of working the soup kitchen together.
I’ve heard people say that losing someone as old as Millie is easier. That all the time they lived and the time you’ve shared makes the loss not such a burden, not so weighted with what ifs. But I didn’t feel like that today. Five hundred years wouldn’t be enough to contain all the potential of a woman like Millie Gustaferson, much less ninety-two. And without her, I was without one of my strongest links to the man I used to be.
The worst thing was that I knew something was off when I talked to her last Tuesday. I should have done more—called the Pinewoods Village director or found the number for one of her children. Mom and Jordan had both visited, and while Jordan told me that she’d been listless and obviously depressed, neither felt like she was in any real danger.
Pneumonia was the official cause of death. But unofficially, her kids told me, there was another element. She’d hidden how severe the illness was from her nurses and her visitors, and by the time Thursday morning dawned, she was gasping and blue and it was too late for the antibiotics to have any real effect.
Sometimes I think it’s not worth it to be here, she’d said. Had she indirectly tried to kill herself by hiding how sick she was?
And how depressed was I that I completely understood how she felt?
I rubbed my cheeks with my hands and took a deep breath. I was too familiar with death from my days as a priest to succumb to the need for explanations and narratives about the deceased’s last days. Death has no narrative.
It just is.
With that cheerful thought, I finally got out of the car and walked into the church that I’d walked into a thousand times before. Everywhere there were signs of change. The new priest’s picture in the foyer next to a list of office hours. Christmas lights and trees a week earlier than I would have put them up. The smell of bread wafting from the kitchen downstairs, when I’d always preferred the evocative smell of incense, and kept some burning almost at all times.
And then there was the building itself. When I’d worked here, the walls had been paneled with fake wood and the carpet had been a dull red—holdovers from a gruesome mid-century renovation. But now the building was exactly what I’d always hoped it would become—modern and light and clean. The walls had been stripped to their original 19th Century brick and stone and the carpet had vanished, replaced by wide planks of blond wood. Pendant lamps of brushed aluminum hung from the ceiling, accented by the old stained glass that had been restored to its original glory. And in the far corner, a glass and concrete baptismal font sat shimmering in the dim December light, water spilling over the inside edges like an infinity pool, filling the church with the gentle music of running water.
St. Margaret’s finally had a building to match her beautiful, passionate congregation. A building a world apart from the scandal that had rocked the town the year before I came, apart from the old, closed-in mindset of the 20th Century church. Light and modernity and openness—Pope Francis’s church. Father Bell’s church.
Except it wasn’t Father Bell’s. It was Father McCoy’s now.
But that was the beauty of the church, really. The priests may change, the congregants may pass away, but the church was still there. The church endured, a steadfast house of solace and refuge for all that come seeking.
The church kept its doors open. Even when its priests left. Knock and the door shall be opened to you, Jesus had promised. Although it felt like I’d been knocking all week and the door to Poppy’s heart had remained as tightly shut and intransigent as ever.
I bit down my urge to criticize Father McCoy during the service. Of course, I would always feel like I could do better, like St. Margaret’s was mine and mine alone, and so I didn’t need to inwardly groan every time he stumbled over a word or lost pitch while chanting the call and response songs. It was fine. Even if it was the funeral of one of the smartest and best women in the world, it was still fine that he was mediocre.
Fine, fine, fine.
By the time the Mass had almost finished and it was time for me to deliver my eulogy, I’d torn my funeral program into tiny, frustrated pieces. I craved Poppy, Millie was dead, and the priest was terrible. What else could a man endure? When I stood to go to the front, Mom cleared her throat quietly and held out her cupped hands for me to dump my piles of shredded program into.
Good old Mom.
The walk to the front felt strange. I’d come down this center aisle so many times, robed and collared and processing behind a cross, and now I was in a civilian’s suit, walking on unfamiliar floors while unfamiliar lights dangled above me.
It should have been me performing her Mass, a petulant part of me thought. What good were you to Millie if you couldn’t even perform her last Mass? Was it worth it? Leaving the church?
Was it?
Well, was it?
I didn’t have an answer to that any more. Plus one degree, minus one wife. Net profit: zero.
I climbed up to the lectern and got behind it, looking out over the crowd as I pulled up my notes on my phone. “So…this feels familiar.”
Several people in the pews laughed despite their tears. Most of the people here had been my flock, and while I knew there was no ill will over my leaving or the way I had left, I still wished I could know what they were thinking as they looked up at me now, standing behind my old lectern.
“We all knew Millie well,” I started, gazing out at the mourners. “And I think no one was surprised to walk in and find a bright purple casket with the Kansas State Wildcat painted on the side. Millie, I know you can hear me from heaven right now, and rock chalk, Jayhawk.”
More laughter. I looked down at my notes, notes I’d written in Sean’s penthouse while gazing out at the gray winter sky. Notes that I’d written thinking about my last night with Poppy, when I’d told her I knew her better than any other person alive.
“Today is a day where we mourn and miss the Millie we all knew. But I want to take a minute and think about all the things we didn’t know. The things we’ll never know now. Whether she liked to keep her hand on the remote while she watched television. Whether she waited for her coffee to brew in the kitchen or whether she did other things while it brewed instead. Whether she preferred her crossword in the morning or at night. We might remember her favorite meal, her favorite hymn…which candidate she sent nasty letters to during the last election.”
Laughter again, because yeah, we all knew that one for sure.
“But a person is so much more than those big things. A person is a collection of small things, of tiny invisible moments, of thoughts too inconsequential to share, of feelings that are too petty not to hide. Of glorious epiphanies too perfect to taint by speaking them out loud. And the real tragedy is not just that we won’t ever get to know these things about Millie. It’s that we so rarely take the time to know them about each other.”
My throat tightened as I thought about Poppy.
“When you go home tonight, look at the people around you. And search for those secrets. Millie would want you to hold on to them, those fleeting insubstantial moments. That was one of her gifts: seeing people how they really are.”
I paused, because I was at the end of my notes, but looking out at the crowd—all crying again—I didn’t want to leave them like this. I wanted to leave this lectern with levity and with laughter. For Millie. So I leaned down and murmured, “And her other gift was casseroles,” which earned the loudest laughter of all, but I didn’t even care at that point because when I lifted my eyes to the back of the sanctuary, I saw a slender woman clad all in black with dark hair and red lips, and it was like lightening striking me where I stood.
Poppy had come after all.