I didn’t cry.

Not one single tear.

What kind of person doesn’t cry at their own mother’s funeral?

I don’t know why I was asking myself the question when the answer was a relatively obvious one.

I was all out of tears.

Just like my mother had been.

What I did do was fixate on how much Mother would’ve hated the entire service. Men sat in front while the women stood in the back, as was our church’s custom.

All were dressed in black.

Mother detested black.

“Family is why God put us here on this earth. Family can build us up and family can tear us down. It’s a sad day when we lose a member of our own community, a mother. A wife. One of God’s devoted children,” Reverend Desmond proclaimed.

As many times as he’d met my mother over the years, he didn’t know a thing about her. Which made sense because he’d never actually spoken to her. Father always did the speaking on behalf of our ‘family’, while Mother and I stood behind him, obediently, with our heads bowed and our hands folded. Eyes to the ground.

And it was because he didn’t know my mother that the Reverend’s sermon was generic at best.

Cold.

No personal details of any sort.

What the Reverend did say was that my mother was where she was always destined to be. Happy and safe in the arms of our Lord and Savior.

A burst of uncontainable laughter flew out of my mouth and when heads turned in my direction, I played it off as a sob of grief. Which, although better than laughter, was also unacceptable.

Without even looking up I could feel my father’s fury from the front row, but my outburst couldn’t have been helped. The hypocrisy was hilarious.

Safe in the arms of our Lord and Savior?

The Church of God’s Light believed that suicide buys you a one-way ticket to hell. Sure, they all played it off like it was an accident, but I knew the truth.

Mother wasn’t accidentally hit by a car.

She knowingly, and with purpose, walked in front of traffic that day.

My father either didn’t know, didn’t care, or just didn’t acknowledge the possibility that it wasn’t an accident. But I wasn’t surprised. He had a way of believing what he wanted and expecting others to believe the same. Even if it was all lies.

Even if those lies were about himself.

Like the one about him being an upstanding citizen.

A leader in the church.

A devoted and loving husband and father.

A man of God.

Father played the part well. He looked just like a widower in the throes of grief with his head bowed. When in reality, he was probably trying not to nod off after downing a large portion of a new bottle of whiskey that morning.

“She was an obedient woman…” the Reverend continued his sermon of half-truths.

Obedient? That was the best he could come up with? Obedient?

My head spun at his sermon.

The whole truth was that my mother, Caroline Dixon, was someone who rarely smiled. She lived under a roof ruled by constant fear. She rarely left the house. She apologized a lot and often. If anyone was keeping a running tab, ‘I’m sorry’ was the sentence she spoke most often during her life, and even then, it was only said in a barely audible whisper to the floor.

A realization hit me so hard I felt like I’d been kneed in the stomach. I doubled over and stumbled backward, muttering apologies to the women I’d knocked into who hopefully thought I was having some sort of fit caused by my overwhelming grief.

Father glanced back, and although to anyone else he appeared sympathetic when he flashed me a sad smile, I knew better and could see the fury forming behind his cold eyes. There was no way my outbursts were going to go unpunished.

I kept walking backward until I was clear of the tent and the crowd. I dropped to the ground and slid all the way down until my back was flat on the grass and the top of my head was pressed against a shiny granite gravestone.

The revelation I was having would turn out to be the thought that launched a thousand ships. That day my life was changed forever, turning down a path there would be no coming back from.

If I kept on living the way I was. The same way Mother had lived. Subservient. Submissive. Abused. Battered. Then that sermon, those very same generic words and lies about a life she never lived, would be spoken at another funeral someday.

Mine.