Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (28 page)

Gradually we started to talk about some of our favorite memories; we talked about how Paul had cried all the way through their wedding, how he’d fallen to his knees and sobbed when he was overwhelmed by the blessing of his first baby boy, and how he had to be
 
—HAD TO BE
 
—the first one on the dance floor whenever live music was playing. We talked about how he never visited a Chinese buffet without consuming a plate of food, then looking around the table and saying, “DING, DING
 
—ROUND TWO” before he went back for “refills.” We talked about his love for Hawaiian shirts and the fact that he had the fashion sense of a color-blind retiree.

We laughed and we cried for about fifteen minutes as family members and friends gathered in the room, and after Elise’s daddy asked us to circle up and hold hands, we prayed. It was such a sacred, holy moment that I’m almost reluctant to write about it, so I’ll just say this. One of the songs at Elise and Paul’s wedding was “Surely the Presence,” and while it was absolutely beautiful on their wedding day, it would have been even more appropriate as we stood around Paul’s bed.

     
Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.

     
I can feel His mighty power and His grace. . . .

The Holy Spirit met us in a hospital room in Pensacola, Florida, that night.

I don’t imagine that any of us will ever forget it.

I think there’s a point when you’re watching someone you love go through something so unthinkable and so painful that words just stop. I mean, you can only express how sorry you are so many times before you run the risk of having the Hallmark crown imprinted on your head and then finding yourself stuck in one of those little slots on the greeting-card aisle at Walgreens. At some point you have to talk about something besides the fact that you’re sorry and that you’ll do whatever you can.

So as much as we cried in the days that followed Paul’s death, we laughed just as much
 
—often at the most inappropriate times. In fact, after
we finished praying that night in Paul’s hospital room, we were still taking in the holiness of the moment, lingering for just a few more precious minutes, when Cindy asked Elise a question in the softest whisper imaginable.

“Essie? Would you like me to take a picture of you and the girls? Of you, Sophie, Katy, Wendi, and Tracey?”

Elise whipped her head around and did her very best to keep her voice down when she answered. “HERE, Mama?”

“Well, sure. I thought you might want a picture! Y’all have always been so close! And this will be their last time to be with you and Paul!” Cindy was doing her best to remain cheerful.

Elise’s volume was at full throttle when she spoke up again. “Yes, Mama, we
are
close. And yes, this
is
their last time with Paul and me. But if it’s all the same to you, I really would prefer not to have a snapshot taken with my friends at the bedside of my near-dead husband.”

Tracey, Katy, Wendi, and I were doing our best not to get tickled, but oh my word, our shoulders were shaking. So when Elise and Cindy started to laugh, the collective dam broke, and we were all so hysterical that we had to bend over and hold our knees.

The next night we were back in Mississippi at Elise and Paul’s house. Elise and I were in her bedroom, working on the program for the first memorial service (there was one in the town where they lived, then another in Paul’s hometown). Elise was trying to figure out what music would be most appropriate, only she and her sister, Christy, got sidetracked by the memory of how their mama used to sing an operatic rendition of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” in the church where they grew up. In no time they were both on their feet, clutching an imaginary podium and belting out the lyrics in their very best Cindy-esque contralto.

     
I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,

     
For His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

Their impression was hilarious
 
—especially the dramatic delivery of the word
watches
. It occurred to me then, just as it occurs to me now, that sometimes the Lord gives us the perfect words in the most unexpected way.

The first memorial service was Monday afternoon, and while most of it, quite honestly, was a blur, I will never forget seeing Elise walk down the aisle with her three handsome boys, ages eleven, ten, and six. Paul was such a great daddy, and there’d been more than one occasion when David and I had quoted some of Paul’s Words o’ Parenting Wisdom with our own little guy. Our favorite was “You will eat the food that your mother has lovingly prepared for you, or you may sit here and watch the rest of us enjoy it. But your mama is not a short-order cook, so there will not be any other culinary options.” We also subscribed to Paul’s theory of keeping extravagances to a minimum so there was plenty of room in the budget for (1) groceries, and (2) a summertime thermostat set to a cool seventy degrees (Elise and Paul actually kept their thermostat on sixty-eight, which meant their house was my favorite place on earth every August).

After the service, Marion (who had driven back to town the night before), Wendi, Tracey, and I piled in Tracey’s car and set out for the Mississippi Delta, the location of the second memorial service. We’d traveled to the Delta together who knows how many times over the previous twenty years; we’d been to weddings, to girls’ weekends, to parties, and to Elise and Paul’s first house during their early married days.

The fact that we were traveling to a memorial service for Paul felt all kinds of wrong.

We spent most of the trip talking about everything and nothing; it was almost like we needed to fill the silence but had nothing left to say.

When we had first heard about funeral arrangements and realized there was going to be another memorial service in Paul’s hometown, I had called a hotel chain, asked about their accommodations in the area, and made a reservation. Being proactive felt oddly comforting for me, and even though it was getting dark when we finally arrived at our destination, the hotel looked decent enough. It was nestled up against the Mississippi River levee, only blocks away from the church and the cemetery we’d be visiting the next morning. It seemed functional, efficient, practical
 
—exactly what we needed.

However.

I think maybe the first indicator that it wasn’t quite time for me to pat myself on my travel-planning back was that our “doormen” were a couple of stray cats that were jumping in the garbage can by the front door and
 
—I kid you not
 
—leaping out of the garbage can with chicken bones in their mouths. For a split second I wished Elise were with us, because she would have wanted to investigate to see if those chicken bones came from Church’s or Popeyes (Elise has been on a first-name basis with the employees at the Church’s in northeast Jackson for upwards of ten years). Marion seemed concerned that the cats weren’t being taken care of and thus had been forced to forage for food, but my primary concern was HUNGRY CATS LEAPING IN AND OUT OF THE GARBAGE CAN. That has to be some sort of urban legend omen.

Once we got to our room, we immediately noticed that it wasn’t just humid
 
—it was DAMP. Borderline wet. The window unit was pumping out cool air, but seeing as how the humidity in the Delta is about 98 percent at all times, we were pretty much standing in the middle of a cool sauna. Even though the conditions were less than ideal, everybody immediately got ready for bed, which was quite a feat considering none of us wanted our feet to touch the wet carpet. Nonetheless, we were exhausted and went to sleep pretty quickly. Safe and sound, snuggled in our semi-wet beds.

It was every bit as luxurious as it sounds.

We all slept fitfully that night but were up and at ’em early the next morning. And if you’ve doubted my assertions of the high level of humidity in the room, I offer you one more detail as proof: when I was putting on my makeup, the brush that I used for blush was wet. I hadn’t run it under the faucet or anything
 
—it had just been sitting in my makeup bag.

I bet the mold-spore count on that brush was high enough to merit a mention on the Weather Channel.

I mention all of that because focusing on those sorts of trivial details is exactly what we were trying to do that morning
 
—trying as best we could to lighten the mood
 
—but we couldn’t escape the heaviness of why we were there. It wasn’t lost on us that it had been only fifteen years since we’d put on those blue floral-print bridesmaid dresses and stood at the front of the
church while Elise and Paul said their vows. So while our attire wasn’t nearly as floral that morning in the hotel, we were once again going to a church for Elise
 
—only for an entirely different reason.

And yes, you do your best to trust the Lord when someone you love is smack-dab in the center of tragedy. But still, it’s hard. And it’s heartbreaking. And sweet mercy, it hurts.

Tuesday’s memorial service was just as tender and poignant as the one the day before. There was a moment, however, when a ringing cell phone interrupted the quiet reflection of the pastor’s words, and after Tracey and I very discreetly rolled our eyes at each other because FOR THE LOVE, LET’S PUT THOSE PHONES ON SILENT, FUNERAL ATTENDEES, we simultaneously realized that the ringing sound was closer to us than we thought.

In fact, the ringing sounded like it was right beside Tracey.

Then we looked at each other again, clearly in a contest to see whose eyes could be bigger and rounder as panic started to set in.

Yep. It was Tracey’s phone.

Tracey began fumbling through her purse, pulling out anything she could get her hands on. The reality was that only five or ten seconds had passed since that first
RING A DING DING
, but it seemed like a small eternity as I watched Tracey pull lip gloss, gum, a hairbrush, sunglasses, and several ponytail holders out of her purse before she got her hands around that blasted phone.

She finally hit a combination of buttons that convinced the phone to HUSH IT, but by that point it was too late. Tracey and I were so tickled that tears were streaming down our faces, and while I kept biting the inside of my lip to hopefully stop what was shaping up to be an incurable case of the (completely inappropriate) giggles, I was also very aware that if Paul had been sitting with us, he would have been laughing harder than anyone else.

And of course that made me cry all over again.

After the memorial service and burial, Paul’s mama’s sweet friends, whose history together was almost forty years strong, served lunch to the family and the out-of-town folks. When Elise finally finished making the rounds and speaking to everyone, she sat down in the middle of a table
of friends from State, looked straight at Tracey, and said, “So, T, that was totally your phone, wasn’t it?”

Tracey grinned sheepishly before she raised her hand
 
—and Elise leaned back in her chair and howled. Hearing her laugh like that was almost like a signal that let us know it was okay to carry on as usual, so for the next hour we reminisced and talked over each other and flat-out guffawed until we were in actual physical pain. We covered, among other topics, Tracey’s recent sighting of an ex-boyfriend who did not remember her even a little bit, Marion’s junior-year term paper about belts (“There are all sorts of belts. Some belts are made of cloth. Others are made of leather. Belts can even be made of metal. And there are many varieties of buckles, as well.”), our profound level of gratitude that we’d gone to college before social media was even a thing, and an episode in the parking lot behind Elise’s freshman dorm when my car emitted such a large, black cloud of smoke that I thought for certain we were witnessing the second coming of our Lord and Savior.

Eventually it was time to leave the church
 
—Elise had a couple of appointments in Paul’s hometown
 
—and when Elise’s daddy looked at us with a little gleam in his eye and told us that if we said another word to Elise it had better be
bye
, I felt tears well up in my eyes.