Death arrives at the most inconvenient of times. It came wearing ice like armor, shouldering in with no apology, no decency. Not a gentle passing in spring with lilacs in bloom, not some soft autumn twilight where the leaves could at least fall in sympathy, but a cruel, jagged winter. Piankashaw County looked more Arctic Circle than Southeast Missouri. People said it was the coldest since ’36, when men lost fingers chopping wood and women prayed over frozen wells. Even the sky was cracked, a dull pewter lid screwed too tight on the world, and every breath you gave up to it felt stolen.
I was the youngest of six men chosen to be pallbearers at my grandfather’s funeral. Roscoe and I had the middle, carrying Big Daddy to his final resting place.
The coffin bit into my shoulder, heavy as sin, polished wood pressing down. Carrying weight I wasn’t sure I could stand. Roscoe’s boots slipped beside me and he cursed under his breath, face red with cold and last night’s whiskey.
The hill was no gentle slope but an ice-slick gauntlet, topped with glassy snow that crunched and then gave way without warning. From below, the mourners looked like crows, black shapes hunched and waiting, scarves whipping like banners. The church bells were frozen silent, but the hill itself seemed to ring with every labored step we took.
The coffin lurched sideways, nearly yanking free, and for one nightmare instant I pictured it skidding straight into the hole, Big Daddy tumbling out in front of all those cousins. Roscoe grinned even while flailing for balance, hat blown crooked, eyes watering. “Told you not to fall,” he wheezed, breath sharp with bourbon. My jaw clenched.
“Walk, asshole,” I said, the words nearly freezing in the air.
The gusts hit like fists, pushing us sideways, making the trees groan. My cheeks stung, my nose streamed, my eyes watered, but the wind scoured it all clean — made grief indistinguishable from weather. That was its only mercy. I forced my chin up, teeth clacking, pretending desperation was pride, pretending I looked like a McCauley and not some kid one slip away from disaster. The last steps stretched forever, each one heavier than the last, until the pedestal loomed ahead like an altar where we would give him up for good.
The box shone obscenely, too smooth and rich for the mud it was bound for. The ropes squealed as the men eased it down, the wood gleaming against the gray world. Father Fitzpatrick’s voice rose, drawn-out syllables echoing across the stones. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—” My stomach clenched. I almost laughed, felt it bubble sharp and wrong in my throat. Not because anything here was funny. Because it was absurd. Big Daddy would’ve laughed himself, called it a circus. And he would’ve been right.
The cedars loomed like sentinels, branches iced over, whispering as the wind raked through them. They’d watched a hundred funerals before this one and would watch a hundred more. That indifference gnawed at me. When the coffin slid deeper, the words “dwell in the house of the Lord forever” rang out, hollow and final, and something beneath my boots cracked — a frozen root, a crust of earth. I staggered, heart pounding, as if the ground itself shifted in protest. Maybe the world just didn’t give a damn.
It was almost funny, if you had a sick enough sense of humor. Reagan on TV swearing to defend liberty, hand raised against a gray sky, and somewhere across Piankashaw Big Daddy wheezed out his last, calling the president a fraud even as he slipped under. That was his punchline.
Then came the wake. Four days of drowning.
Bottles emptied into glasses, glasses into mouths. Joints glowing like votive candles in the corners. Laughter that sounded more like barking, tears buried under chemical fog. Irish Wake was just a fancy word for obliteration. I drifted from room to room, face numb, eyes red, pretending to listen, pretending to belong, ducking out whenever I could to sink deeper into my haze. The booze kept the sharp edges away. Made death tolerable. I was counting on more of that anesthesia to get me through this day too.
Father Fitzpatrick finished the 23rd Psalm in an almost Gregorian chant. It droned on, long and sonorous, like a record stuck on repeat. Sniffles floated around us, wet and muffled, hands fumbling for Kleenex. Then a sharp crack, a branch splintering under ice, snapping like a gunshot, made me flinch. For a moment I thought it was me breaking, spine giving way under all this weight. Fitzpatrick’s voice buzzed in my skull like one of Emily Dickinson’s flies, a drone at the edge of silence, reminding me the end wasn’t holy or beautiful. It was just noise, cold, and collapse.
Then came Gram’s sobs, sharper than the wind, ragged and raw, like something small and hurt and dying. Each one twisted in my chest, but I kept my chin up, spine rigid, rehearsing the role of strong grandson, carrying the family name like armor. McCauleys didn’t cry. McCauleys held the line. That’s what I told myself. Then I heard someone gulp back an anguished sob and realized it had come from me.
Part of me wonders why we subject ourselves to these things. The whole thing felt like theater, and not even good theater. A pageant of grief where everyone knew their lines by heart. As if watching a man shrink to skin and bone, gasping for air like a fish on a dock, hadn’t been ritual enough. As if holding Gram’s hand while I told her he was gone hadn’t been ceremony enough. That was the real wake, the real funeral, all the hours leading up to this, not this charade on the hill. But still, we stood here to let the bit players arrive and deliver their one-act performances. Cousins who couldn’t be bothered to cross town when he was alive now came dressed in pressed coats, ready with practiced tears. The out-of-towners swept in smelling of expensive perfume and airline peanuts, faces arranged in solemn masks, eager to tell us how sorry they were for not being here sooner. They shook our hands with cold fingers and looked past us, already rehearsing what they’d say later over ham salad and coffee.
Closure was for amateurs.
We’d been closing the door on him inch by inch all winter — each new pill bottle, each rattling cough, each prayer Gram whispered into her apron. I thought I was done. I thought I’d made my peace. Even felt lighter in some twisted way, like the air in the house had shifted the moment he finally let go. Relief — sharp and ugly — followed me like a shadow, and guilt clung to it, gnawing at me in the quiet hours. But this wasn’t about us, wasn’t about him. It was for the cousins, the neighbors who came out of obligation, the church ladies with casseroles cooling in the backseat.
Doing all this so others could get closure was bullshit we didn’t need. We weren’t doing it for Big Daddy and we sure weren’t doing it for ourselves, and I was angry that custom said we had to do it for people who didn’t deserve it and shouldn’t have asked. Yet we gathered, stood in silence at the funeral parlor for days, meeting lines of mourners, trying to hold it together while they gave their clichéd, helpless condolences. This was their performance, their excuse to feel part of something. We were the props, the family on stage, expected to smile tight, nod gravely, play along with their script. Rage simmered under my coat, hot enough to melt the grief clean off me, but I kept it buttoned tight.
They came in waves, a parade of phonies. Cousins who hadn’t called in six months now wept like widows, mascara smearing artfully down their cheeks. The out-of-towners strutted, all solemn whispers and nods, like they were auditioning for Bereaved Relative Number Four. They took turns at the coffin, dabbing eyes, sighing, patting my shoulder, each one pulling a fresh cliché from the same tired deck.
“He was such a good man…”
“He’s in a better place now…”
“You’ll see him again someday…”
Each line rehearsed, delivered with all the conviction of a toothpaste commercial.
Roscoe leaned close, voice low. “If one more of them says that ‘better place’ shit, I’m throwing them in with him.”
I nearly smiled. “You’d be doing us all a favor.”
It wasn’t anger so much as exhaustion curdled into rage. Fuck off, I thought, watching another cousin dab daintily at dry eyes like she was in a TV soap. We’d seen it, day after day: Big Daddy shrinking into his sheets, ribs showing through skin, the house reeking of Vicks and piss and cancer meds. The tumor stole his appetite first, then his voice, then his humor, leaving him a husk who stared at the ceiling like it owed him answers. That was goodbye, in a hundred tiny cuts. That was closure. And now here came the vultures, circling, eager for their piece of sanctity.
Roscoe said, “Half these bastards couldn’t pick him out of a lineup last month.”
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “But now they get to sleep better, thinking they showed up when it counted.”
The family stood anyway, lined up like actors waiting for curtain call, each mourner filing past, dropping their empty words in our laps like coins in a jukebox. We nodded, shook clammy hands, played our parts. And every time someone said so sorry for your loss, the urge rose in me to scream, you don’t know the first goddamn thing about loss.
The final thump of hard earth on wood echoed like a closing door, and then it was over. No grand finale, no lightning bolt – just dirt and silence. The crowd dissolved instantly, black coats flapping as they hurried to warm cars idling on the roadside. From above they might’ve looked like scavenger birds lifting off at once, leaving nothing but scraps.
And then came the line, it always came: “We really need to get together more often, not just at funerals.”
The words crawled across my skin. I wanted to spit in the snow, to say, Then fucking do it. Because we all knew once they drove off, they’d vanish again, retreat to subdivisions and routines, calling only when someone else dropped dead.
But I said nothing. I shoved my fists deep in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, staring into the raw hole we’d left. It looked obscene, like an open wound, and I couldn’t shake the thought that we’d just buried a man so those people could feel righteous on the ride home.
As they drifted away, the family was walking from the grave for the last time and feeling that revelation: this was it. Goodbyes would forever go unsaid no matter how many times you said them. It hung there like a cold dark cloud. There were things I wanted to say, but there was no one to say them to, because the one I wanted to hear me was already gone.
Grief doesn’t play fair. It isn’t noble, it isn’t clean. It’s a con artist with a crooked smile, standing just out of sight, letting you think you’ve beaten it. You watch a man waste away for months, wipe his forehead, hear the last breath rattle out, think you’ve faced the worst and come out the other side. You convince yourself you’ve buried the pain already, tucked it under the same blankets you pulled over his wasted frame. You even dare to believe in closure, that shabby consolation prize.
But grief has patience. It bides its time in the corner, waiting for your guard to drop. And then, when the last scoop of dirt thuds on the coffin, when the priest coughs out the final “Amen,” when the black coats scatter to warm cars and you’re left with silence thick enough to choke on… That’s when it strikes. Not in fire, but in dull weight. The heavy hand on the chest that reminds you every goodbye you whispered, every word you rehearsed, will never land. They dissolve in the air, useless as smoke, because the one man who could receive them is gone and there’s no forwarding address in the grave.
It lingers then, like a storm cloud without rain, black and endless. I felt it press down, stupid and blunt, no poetry in it, just the dumb fact of absence. The words piled in my throat, choking me, and there was no one left to hear them. Not the man with the dime-store-cowboy insults, not the grandfather whose voice once filled the kitchen louder than the radio. He was gone, and the silence he left behind was louder than anything he’d ever spoken.
Gram said she was ready to go, her words thin, barely breath. “I’m ready.” The sound of it hurt worse than the wind ever could. The strength was gone, wrung out of her in long nights at his bedside, and now she spoke like someone whose voice had been worn down to thread.
Jake and I moved in together, each taking an elbow. Her bones pressed sharp through her coat, light as a bird. I could feel the tremor running through her arm, not from cold but something deeper, a shaking that lived under the skin. The hill was a bastard to climb, but coming down was worse — slick with ice, treacherous with hidden ruts. Every step we slowed, steadying her like she might crack if we jarred her. Her breath whistled faintly, quick little puffs that vanished almost as they formed.
Behind us the grave sat open like an accusation, tugging at me. Ahead of us the cars idled, exhaust pluming white, mourners climbing in, turning the heat on, brushing frost from windshields, already moving on.
At the bottom I eased my hand away, the ghost of her weight lingering in my palm. My throat closed up, but I forced words out. “I’m gonna walk home.” St. Agnes Hill was only about a half mile from our house, and I needed time to be alone before facing anyone again.
Jake stopped, boots crunching. He turned slow, fixing me with that stare — storm-gray eyes, same as the man we’d just buried, eyes that looked like they’d already seen too much.
“You sure?” he asked, voice low.
I nodded, though it felt like a flinch. “Yeah. I need the air.” The words came rough, torn at the edges.
Jake’s jaw worked, but he just nodded, like a judge passing a sentence. “Alright. Don’t stay out too long.” He turned back to Gram, guiding her to the car. I stood a second longer, watching them go, then turned toward the road home.
The walk down that half-mile stretch felt longer than the whole week. Behind me, the grave tugged like gravity, a collapsed star dragging at my gut, whispering “turn back,” nothing worth a damn waited at the house. My boots ground out a rhythm on the gravel, dry and hollow, the crunch carrying through the stillness like I was the last man alive. Each drag of snow across the blacktop hissed like a secret told just out of reach.
The world was stripped bare. The trees were white skeletons, branches clattering with each gust like old men arguing about nothing. The houses crouched low, curtains drawn, smoke coughing from stovepipes in weak gray threads. Somewhere a dog barked once, short and desperate, then went silent. The air smelled of creosote and ash and the faint sweet rot of leaves buried under ice.
And the silence. Christ, the silence. pressing into my ears until I could hear nothing but the scrape of my boots and the thump of my own heart. It made me think of the house, how empty it would be now: no lawn chair scraping on the porch, no cough rattling from the bedroom, no booming laugh in the kitchen. Just Gram’s small voice, the tick of the clock, the hollow echo of someone missing.
The funeral mass was our equivalent of watching the credits roll at the end of a life. The names of the supporting cast, triumphant music for a life finished.
I was walking away after the curtain closed. In the movies, soft music plays with the credits, after all the loose ends are tied. Real life isn’t like the movies. No soft music, and the ending’s too messy for Hollywood, unresolved. Living at the end of this movie was something else. The part nobody stayed for: house lights slapping on, audience coughing, gathering coats, popcorn mashed into the sticky floor. I was still sitting there after the reel burned out, stuck in my seat, no credits, no score, just the blank screen and the dumb fact of having to walk out of the theater alone.
That’s when the paper skidded across the road: tan card stock, official and cheap at once, his name stamped on it like an ad. Big Daddy’s funeral announcement, skipping across the gravel, caught in the same hard wind that whipped us raw on the hill. It tumbled once, twice, then collapsed into the ditch, like the world itself saying: everything you think matters doesn’t last.
I kicked a rock into the weeds and shoved my hands deeper in my coat, collar up against the wind. Kept walking, because what else was there to do.
It felt obscene, walking away while the hole still yawned behind me, obscene the way theaters feel when the house lights slam on and you see the sticky cups and popcorn underfoot, the magic gone. Nobody stays for that part — they scuttle out, buttoning coats, talking about dinner, pretending the story ended clean when it didn’t. I was the fool who stayed behind, watching the empty screen glow, asking what happens when the projector reel is spent and there’s nothing left but silence.
The world didn’t pause, didn’t dim its lights, didn’t care that Big Daddy had slipped out of it. Trucks still rattled down Highway 67. Kids still left sleds tipped against chain-link fences. Somewhere a radio still played Ronnie Milsap. And that indifference hurt worse than the death, because it said the story only stops for you. For everyone else, it’s just Tuesday.
I walked with my collar high, fists jammed in my coat like I was holding myself together from the inside, breath steaming out in ugly clouds. Each step felt heavier, not lighter, the distance from the grave stretching like rubber, tugging at me. I thought: maybe this is what the afterlife is like: not harps or hellfire but walking on the wrong side of the credits, stumbling around after the reel’s gone dead, trapped in the part no one bothers to imagine.
And the questions came sharp, relentless: Is this it? Is this what we have to look forward to? You work, you suffer, you fight, you love a little, you curse presidents on TV, and then one day the projector reel is spent, what happens when the lights come on? Most people never stay long enough to find out. But that’s what I was doing, living after the end of the movie. No music, no heroes, no leading lady. No celebration of a life well lived. Just the aftermath.
The sadness wasn’t clean. It wasn’t cathartic. It was stupid and endless, like a nail driven too deep to pull back out. A gaping puncture through the soul: not bleeding, not clotting, not healing. Just hurting. Forever there. The noise dies, the priest goes home, the mourners scatter, and you’re left in the raw air with a wound the world will never acknowledge. A wound that belongs to you alone. That’s what remains after the requiem.
William Matthew McCarter is Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and teaches American literature in Southeast Missouri. His fiction and essays explore working-class identity, loss, and the small moral reckonings of rural life. His recent scholarship appears in Race, Class, and Capital (Florida International University). When not writing, he’s usually somewhere between the Ozarks and the Delta, listening to ghosts and old records.