Part 3: A Strong One
“Finish what Jack asked you to say.”
I squeezed his arm once. Then I walked back to my seat.
Daniel was crying openly now, not hiding it at all. He reached for my hand the moment I sat down and held it so tightly it hurt.
Theo stood at the microphone again.
He studied the note for a moment. Then he folded it carefully and tucked it back into the pocket.
“I actually wrote a eulogy,” he said.
He lifted a thick stack of papers from the podium. Typed. Stapled at the corner.
“Seven pages.”
A voice from the row of Jack’s school friends said, “Jeez, Theo.”
Devin. Of course it was Devin.
Theo laughed. A real laugh, wet and surprised.
“Exactly,” he said. “Jack would’ve hated it. He’d have fallen asleep on page two.”
He set the pages on the edge of the podium.
“So I’m not reading it.”
And instead, he just talked.
He didn’t talk about cancer. Not mostly.
He talked about the summer they were twelve, when they were practicing hockey shots in our driveway and accidentally broke the garage window with a puck.
“We spent three hours,” Theo said, “coming up with explanations. Increasingly stupid explanations. We had a list. A written list. Jack wanted to say it was a meteor. I wanted to blame a neighbor kid we didn’t like. Jack said that was unethical.”
People were smiling now. Real smiles.
“We finally decided to blame a bird.”
Daniel laughed out loud beside me. He remembered. I remembered.
“Mr. Harris came home,” Theo said, “and looked at the window, and looked at us, and asked, ‘What kind of bird carries a hockey puck?’”
He paused.
“And Jack said, ‘A strong one.’”
The whole church laughed. Even the old man at the front who’d been shaking his head.
Daniel was laughing and crying at once, his head bowed. “A strong one,” he repeated under his breath. “God. A strong one.”
He’d grounded them both for a week. Theo too. Theo’s parents were in the middle of separation number two at the time, and nobody else was going to ground him, so Daniel did. Theo told me years later it was the first time he’d felt like somebody was paying attention.
Theo told everyone about Jack cheating at Monopoly. Every single game. He’d steal money from the bank when he thought nobody was looking.
“And when you caught him,” Theo said, “he’d say it wasn’t cheating. Because—and I quote—‘The bank has insurance.’”
More laughter.
Then Theo grew a little quieter.
He told them about the first day of high school. Freshman year.
“I had a panic attack,” he said. “In the bathroom. Second floor, by the science wing. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was dying. I locked myself in a stall and sat on the floor.”
The church went very quiet again.
“Jack found me. I don’t know how. He just showed up. And he didn’t make a big deal of it. He didn’t call a teacher. He sat down on the floor outside the stall door and started talking. Really loudly. About how this was great, actually, because we’d both decided to skip second period on purpose, and wasn’t it amazing, our first day and already we were rebels.”
Theo looked at the coffin.
“He sat on that bathroom floor with me for the whole period. Telling me capital cities. Until I could breathe again.”
I hadn’t known that.
There was so much I hadn’t known.
Then Theo’s voice shifted again, lower.
“When Jack got sick,” he said, “everybody started calling him brave.”
He looked down at the podium.
“He hated that.”
I knew that.
Jack once told me, after a particularly bad day with a new nurse, “Mom, if one more adult tells me I’m brave while putting a needle in me, I’m going to become violent.”
I’d laughed. He hadn’t.
“He said being sick wasn’t brave,” Theo said. “It was just happening to him. He didn’t choose it. You can’t be brave about something you didn’t choose. That’s just being stuck.”
Theo’s hands tightened around the edges of the podium.
“But I think there was one thing he was brave about.”
He looked at Daniel and me.
“He knew,” Theo said. “Before most of us were willing to know.”
I closed my eyes.
“He knew he might die.”
The words hurt, even then. Even though we’d already buried him in every way except the last one. Even though his body lay right there in a pine box.
They still hurt.
“And somehow,” Theo said, “he still spent half his time trying to make everybody else less afraid.”
Theo touched the skirt of the dress and smoothed it with his palm.
“This wasn’t Jack making fun of me,” he said.
Then he smiled.
“Okay. It was partly Jack making fun of me.”
More laughter, softer now.
“But mostly,” Theo said, “I think he wanted one last thing he could control.”
That landed harder than anything else he said that day.
Cancer had taken control from Jack piece by piece. I’d watched it happen.
His school. He missed most of junior year and all of senior year. He took his finals from a hospital bed.
His hair. Twice.
His appetite. He’d lost thirty pounds by the end.
His privacy. Nurses and doctors and machines, all day and all night. Strangers looking at his body. Strangers deciding when he slept and when he ate.
His plans. Mongolia. College. Ulaanbaatar.
Eventually, his ability to walk without help.
But this he had chosen.
A red dress.
A promise.
A joke that waited six months for its punch line.
“So,” Theo said. “This is for Jack.”
He looked down at himself. At the red dress and the black socks and the dress shoes.
“I hate it,” he said.
And from the very back of the church, his sister Emma called out, loud and clear, “You look great!”
The room erupted.
People laughed so hard the pews creaked. Marcus put his face in his hands. An old woman in a feathered hat had to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. Rick, behind me, laughed so loudly that his wife elbowed him.
Even I laughed.
At my son’s funeral. With his coffin six feet in front of me. I laughed.
Theo shook his head and pointed to the back of the church.
“Thank you, Emma.”
Then he turned and looked at the coffin one last time.
He looked at it so long that the laughter died away and the church went still again.
“You win, idiot,” he said softly.
And he stepped away from the microphone.
After the service, everyone wanted to talk to Theo.
That was almost funny, considering how many of them had stared at him when he came in.
People lined up. Literally lined up, in the aisle, while the pallbearers waited.
Rick was the first.
Daniel’s younger brother. Big man. Fishing hat. Not a bad person, really, just a man who said the first thing that came into his head and thought about it later, if ever.
He walked over to Theo awkwardly, hands in his suit pockets.
“Theo.”
Theo looked nervous. He took a small step back.
Rick cleared his throat.
“I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“I was judging you,” Rick said, “before you even sat down.”
Theo shrugged and looked at the floor.
“It’s okay.”
“No,” Rick said.
He glanced toward Jack’s coffin.
“It isn’t.”
Then he took his hand from his pocket and held it out.
Theo stared at it for a second. Then he shook it.
Rick held on a moment longer than he needed to.
“He was right about me,” Rick said quietly. “Your speech is better than mine would’ve been. I’d have talked about fishing.”
Theo almost smiled.
“He said you’d talk about fishing for an hour.”
Rick laughed. Then his face crumpled, and he walked away fast before anyone could see.
Others followed.
Some hugged him. Jack’s chemistry teacher. Glenda, the nurse who’d pretended not to see the candles. Mrs. Okafor from next door, who’d brought us casseroles three times a week for fourteen months.
Some told him Jack would have loved it.
“He would’ve been so smug,” Marcus said, hugging him. “Unbearable. He’d have been unbearable about this.”
One elderly aunt of Daniel’s, Aunt Ruth, who was eighty-seven and had opinions about everything, took Theo’s hand in both of hers and looked him up and down.
“Young man,” she said. “I still don’t understand boys today. But your speech was beautiful.”
Theo nodded gravely.
“Honestly,” he said, “that’s fair.”
And for the first time all day, I glimpsed something close to the Theo I knew. The kid with the enormous ears. The one who fell off the couch laughing at a cheap atlas.
Theo’s parents weren’t there.
I noticed that later. I looked for them at the reception. His mother had texted me the night before that she “wasn’t feeling up to it.” His father hadn’t sent anything.
Emma was there. She stood by the coffee urn the whole reception, talking to nobody, watching her little brother get hugged by strangers.
I went over to her.
“Thank you,” I said. “For the dress.”
She looked at me. She had the same eyes as Theo, big and dark and wary.
“He was up all night,” she said. “Trying it on. Taking it off. He called me at three in the morning and said he couldn’t do it. Then he called me at five and said he had to.” She shook her head. “He made me promise not to tell anybody. Even you. He said Jack had to be the one to tell you. Through the letter.”
I looked over at Theo.
“I’m so glad he came,” I said.
“Me too.” Emma’s voice wobbled. “My parents are idiots. You know that, right? Everybody knows that.”
I didn’t answer.
“Your family,” Emma said. “You were his real— You know.” She looked down at her coffee. “Thank you. For Christmas. For the room with the rocket ships. He told me about the rocket ships.”
I hugged her. She was stiff for a second. Then she wasn’t.
Later, after most people had drifted off to the reception hall, I went back to the front of the church alone.
We’d set up a table of photographs near the entrance. Pictures of Jack at every age. Baby pictures. School pictures. Halloween costumes. Jack at the beach, Jack in his soccer uniform, Jack bald in a hospital bed giving a thumbs-up.
Theo found me there.
I was gazing at one picture in particular. The two boys at eight years old, in our backyard after a rainstorm, covered in mud from head to toe, both missing their shoes, grinning like criminals.
I’d taken it myself. I remembered scolding them for twenty minutes afterward. I remembered hosing them off on the lawn like dogs while they screamed and laughed.
Theo stood beside me. He was still in the dress, with his suit jacket pulled on over it at some point.
We looked at the picture together for a while.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Jack didn’t want you to know.”
My stomach tightened.
“Know what?”
“That he thought he was going to die.”
I stared at the photograph. At my son’s muddy, gap-toothed grin.
Theo hurried on.
“Not because he didn’t trust you. It wasn’t that.”
“I know.”
“He said you and Mr. Harris needed hope. He said you needed it more than he did.”
That hurt. That hurt more than almost anything.
“He was the sick one,” I said.
“I told him that.”
“What did he say?”
Theo smiled sadly.
“He said, ‘Yeah. But Mom’s dramatic.’”
I laughed through the tears, a wet, broken laugh.
“That little jerk.”
“He loved you,” Theo said.
“I know.”
“He wasn’t pretending, though,” Theo said. “To be hopeful. I need you to know that. He wasn’t faking it for you.”
That mattered. It mattered more than I can say. All day I’d been terrified that the entire fourteen months had been a performance, that every conversation about Mongolia and curly hair and college had been my son lying to make me feel better.
I looked at Theo.
“He wanted college,” Theo said. “He wanted to travel. He really thought the treatment might work. He’d get excited about it. We looked up flights to Mongolia. He made a whole spreadsheet.”
Then he added, more quietly, “He just knew it might not.”
Both things.
Hope and fear. At the same time. In the same body.
My eighteen-year-old son had somehow learned that they could coexist long before I did. I’d thought you had to choose one. I’d thought that if I let the fear in, even a little, the hope would drain out of me like water from a cracked glass.
Jack knew better.
“Did he talk about dying often?” I asked.
“No.”
“Really?”
“Maybe three times,” Theo said. “The night of the scan. Once in the summer, at like two in the morning. And once in the hospital. Near the end.”
I nodded slowly.
Then I made myself ask the question I feared most.
“Was he scared?”
Theo didn’t answer right away.
That was answer enough.
“Yes,” he said finally.
I started crying again, properly this time, standing in the church entryway in front of a table of photographs with my hand over my mouth.
Theo put his arm around my shoulders.
“He wasn’t scared all the time,” he said. “I promise. Most of the time he was just Jack. Annoying. Cheating at Monopoly. Making me watch tomato movies.”
I leaned into him.
“Thank you,” I said. “For not lying to me.”
He nodded.
“I promised him that too.”
That night, Daniel and I sat on the edge of our bed in our funeral clothes for a long time.
Neither of us had the energy to change.
“I almost dragged that kid out of the church,” Daniel said finally.
“I know.”
“I was standing up. I was halfway there. If you hadn’t grabbed my sleeve—” He shook his head. “I’d have done it, Laura. I’d have walked over and taken him by the arm in front of everyone.”
“So would I,” I said. “I was thinking about it. Before you even saw him.”
He looked at me.
“Really?”
“I asked Jack’s friends if they’d had a fight. I thought maybe he was doing it to hurt us.”
Daniel stared at the carpet.
“Jack knew we’d do that,” he said slowly. “Didn’t he. That’s why he wrote the note. He knew we’d see the dress and think the worst.”
“I think so.”
Daniel laughed. A small, tired, broken laugh.
“Our son,” he said, “planned a prank on his own funeral six months in advance, and the target was us.”
“And Uncle Rick.”
“And Uncle Rick.” Daniel wiped his eyes. “He got Rick. He got Rick so good.”
We laughed until we cried. Then we just cried.
And then we fell asleep in our clothes, holding on to each other on top of the covers.
