Good Mourning Read Online Free

team, feeding off of each other’s practicality and general anxiety, and then there was me and Dad, always up to something fabulous and fun. While I love my mother—she’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met—Dad was my person. Ialways knew he had my back. Even my mom seemed to recognize that Dad’s death would affect me in a different way than my brother. She certainly wasn’t going to say anything when I grabbed his watch. Nobody was.
    â€œAre you ready?” Mom asked from the hallway. Turns out, she and Max hadn’t gotten much sleep either. Since we were all ready to go, we decided to walk over to Crawford together.
    Tony was the first person to greet us. He paid special attention to my mother, carefully directing her into the room where my father’s casket was displayed, along with framed photos of him from different points of his life. There it was: Dad on a sailboat, Dad with his best friend, Dad piling sand onto the yard at our country house to create a “beach.” A whole life laid out in still images, which I had delivered in a box the day before. Mom saw the white peonies and put her hands over her mouth. “Oh,” she said, holding her hand to her chest, her eyes filling with tears.
    â€œWhere’s the restroom?” I asked, needing a minute to myself. Tony directed me down the hall. Just as I turned the corner toward the ladies’ room, I bumped into another man in a black suit holding a large makeup bag.
    â€œYou have more makeup than I do,” I said, smiling.
    The man smiled back softly. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to get in your way.”
    â€œIt’s fine,” I said. “I’m Liz, Brett’s daughter.”
    â€œSo sorry for your loss, Elizabeth,” said the man. He hadan accent similar to Tony’s, but more wrinkles than him and warm blue eyes. “I’m Bill.”
    I thought I had heard Tony mention his name. “Are you the embalmer?” I asked.
    Bill looked uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to the other. “That would be me,” he said. “Again, so sorry about your dad.”
    What else can you say to someone who just lost their ­favorite person?
    When I got back to the chapel, I noticed that all of the additional chairs the staff had brought in for overflow guests were going to create a traffic jam near the casket. “They all need to go to the back of the room,” I said out loud, looking around to see if I could find Tony. I’d planned enough events to know that if things got really crowded, as I suspected they might, we’d need the space for standing room.
    Mom shook her head. “There’s no need. This service is just for family and very close friends. There will only be a small group of us,” she said.
    An hour later, more than five hundred people were lined up out the door of the funeral home. There were, of course, old friends and neighbors, family members and colleagues from the law firm. There were also Dad’s clients—rap stars and fashion moguls, famous entertainers and their entourages. (Only in Manhattan can a funeral double as a place to see and be seen.)
    I wasn’t surprised by the diverse crowd. That was the thing about Dad—he made everyone feel like a close friend.
    I busied myself greeting people as they entered the room. Instead of boring hymns, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones buzzed from the speakers. I hugged everyone at the door, trying to signal that this was an upbeat affair—it was okay to laugh and share stories. Once traffic was moving steadily to the front of the room, I ran over to find Max, who was nervously holding a copy of the eulogy we had written together. “You about ready?” I said. Don’t get me wrong—I was nervous too. But Max and I had spent hours deciding which details of Dad’s life to share with a room full of people who loved him. I had a feeling