My Father's Footprints Read Online Free PDF Page B

one more time, all made up and in the box.
    So does Joey.
    “I couldn’t go see him in the nursing home because I was so sick. Now I want to say goodbye,” he tells me.
    He wants to give him a toy or something else to keep in the casket, too.
    In my mother’s kitchen, he spots a type of chocolate cookie my father loved. Dad and my mother fought about them, because
     his diabetes made them a hazard, the way he went at them.
    “You could put some of those cookies in the casket,” he tells her. “Bob loved them.”
    “Oh, no,” says my mother, who risked her health and maybe her life to keep him at home until the final ten days, who ministered
     to him with a tenderness that touched and surprised me. “He’s not getting any cookies.”

    Passing through the kitchen during the day, I come upon a doodle by Joey. He has drawn two Saint-Exupéry stars with arrows
     reaching up to them. The arrows stretch out from the words
    Bob
    Oh Bob
    Shall we gather at the casket?
    Apparently so. I thought nobody would want a “viewing,” but apparently everybody does. My mother, wife, and son are at the
     funeral home looking at the body. So is my dad’s cousin Peggy, the closest thing he ever had to a sibling. The mortician,
     trying to be helpful, has put so much terra-cotta makeup on my dad that he looks like a clay model of himself. All of the
     hawklike comical ferocity is gone from his features.
    Joey has chosen two toys—a stuffed sheep and a plastic fairy—to put in the casket with his grandfather. He has also written
     a note.
    Dear Bob
    I love you
    If you read this.
    Love, Joey.
    We’re a family of notes, apparently.
    When my grandmother died, she left instructions requesting a pair of warm socks and a certain robe she had been saving for
     the journey to the next life. When somebody went looking in her closet, they found a likely robe. In the pocket was a note.
     It read, “This is it.”
    She was my mother’s mother, Alma Cotton, daughter of a widowed farm laborer. Standing at my father’s casket, I’m dimly aware
     that I don’t even know the name of his mother, whom he could not bring himself to discuss. I know nothing, save one or two
     tiny details, about her life. I couldn’t even guess where she’s buried.
    On my way to the graveside ceremony, in the brief stretch of road from my mother’s apartment to the cemetery, I am seized
     by an impulse. I want balloons.
    I stop at a store, race in, get five blue helium balloonsyoked together with metallic ribbons. Why five, why blue, I couldn’t say.
    And thence to the cemetery, where a tiny knot of “immediate family” has gathered for a ceremony presided over by Sean Kennelly.
    “Joey, do you know Grampa’s not in there?” Sean asks, nodding at the box before he begins. (“No,” I think giggily, “but hum
     a few bars and we’ll fake it.”)
    Joey nods yes, and Sean says a bit more about that in his Dublin brogue. He reads a few things, including a bit from a Jewish
     service, and leads us in the Lord’s Prayer. (Who can it hurt?)
    And then Joey and I go up on a rise of earth, and he turns loose the balloons. Still tethered together, the blue globes circle
     one another, weaving, passing through, bobbing, changing places like dancers in some very complex gavotte. Whirl, loop, circle
     back in the chaotic breezes of noon.
    Bob.
    Oh Bob.
    All of the elements of the man, I think, are drifting into heaven’s vault. His love, his humor, his sorrow, his anger, and
     his fifth element—that remarkable knack for leaving the world and entering magical realms. We can see, too, the silver lightning
     flashes of ribbon snaking among the balloons.
    “Bye, Dad,” I hear myself say.
    The others keep watching, but I turn away, because my eyes aren’t good. And because I’m done. I saw him go up.
    Joey, however, is glancing over at the grave, where the casket is still seated in its frame, above ground.
    “When do they put it in?” he whispers.
    “Not until