All through the memorial, the image of Autumn nuzzled against Finn’s coffin, her face against the cold metal, haunts me. I hear her absence in the stories people tell, even as I laugh and grieve with them. Finn feels so alive with all these people here. It’s Autumn who is the ghost.
Sylvie sits in the front row in between Angelina and a man who must be Finn’s father. I can only see the back of his blond head and a bit of his profile. His shoulders are tense, but they do not shake. He seems to stare ahead, unwavering, at whoever is speaking about the son he barely knew.
People talk about Finn, and they cry. They talk about Finn, and they laugh. Everyone is united in missing Finn, but I don’t understand how everyone can act like this is all so ordinary. As if Finn being dead is logical. There aren’t as many people at the funeral as at the wake, but it’s more than I expected. Jamie Allen, Autumn’s ex, is there with a girl I’m pretty sure Autumn used to be pretty close with, though it looks like she’s pretty close with Jamie now. Finn had told me about the situation with her friends. They keep looking around and whispering. Maybe they’re looking for
Autumn.
Then the funeral director gives us a signal. The guys from the team and I all stand. We’re done talking about Finn. It’s time to put him away.
Before the memorial started, the funeral director explained how we would lift the casket together, but it feels like being in a play unrehearsed. We get through it though. One guy behind me stumbles, and for a second, I wonder if Finn felt the tilt, but then I have to bite my lip to keep from crying when I remember that Finn couldn’t. It’s done. He’s on my shoulder. Finn. Inside this box is Finn, was Finn, and his head is probably near my own. As we walk him to the hearse, I hear Autumn’s voice, We’re just being close one last time.
This will be Finn’s last car ride. The doors close behind the coffin, and my parents ask me if I will be okay if they skip the graveyard service.
I tell them that it’s okay, even though none of this is okay, because their being there wouldn’t make it any easier.
I ride with Coach to the graveyard. He asks me if I want to talk. I say
no.
We follow the hearse to Bellefontaine Cemetery. Past the gates, the
hearse travels down a long path past the mausoleums, some the size of houses, some like sheds of stone. Finn was the only one in class to get the extra credit question on the American Literature final, What icon of the Beat Generation is buried in St. Louis’s own Bellefontaine Cemetery? He shrugged when I asked him how he remembered, and we never imagined he’d soon have something in common with Burroughs.
We pull up to a newer, more open part of the cemetery. No grand mausoleums here, simply headstones standing tall, for now.
We line up as a team again and lift him with more grace than before. This time, I try to cherish the weight of him on my shoulder. I lean my cheek where I hope is close to his.
And then on a quiet count to three, we set Finn down forever. There is crying again but no more laughing.
In the row of chairs by the grave, the man who was supposed to be Finn’s father sits, leaning forward with his head in his hands, and does not
look up even once. Sylvie, seated next to him again, sits ramrod straight, like her purpose is to be a wall between him and Angelina. Perhaps it is.
I knew the poem about an athlete dying young was coming. I hadn’t known how different it would sound as Coach read it here, by Finn’s grave.
His final resting place. His final everything. They’re about to do it.
There’s a mechanical hum as his coffin is lowered down.
It’s not really him, yet it is him, and they’re putting him away forever. I want to beg someone to stop this, to let me keep him, please.
But it’s done. Finn, my friend, is in a hole in the earth. For the rest of my life, no matter how long I live, I will always know exactly where he is, because he’s never going to move again.
People are lining up to throw a handful of dirt in the hole before they leave him, but I can’t do this last thing for him, so I stand there and watch.
As the grave begins to slowly fill with dirt, I think of Autumn coming later, after the rest of us have gone, to be with him.
