When we entered Latham Cemetery, and I confess I was still unsure that all my phone calls had produced a ready hole in the ground, we saw, in the distance, a lone truck next to a fresh mound of earth. We pulled up to the driver and instead of introducing ourselves we simply said hi.

Keith, who worked for the vault company, was a young guy, lean of frame, not too tall, and with a quick smile and efficient manner. He grumbled just a bit about how the concrete box (into which the body is placed) didn’t fit into the grave. Instead of four inches too long, the hole was four inches too short. Not a problem on a warm day with soft earth, and a truck with a motorized winch, but this day he had neither. The arduous process of raising and lowering the half ton box was pure mechanical advantage – a long chain wrapped through a series of pulleys. Easy to lower, but way slow to raise, and bare-handed Keith was doing just that in 11 degree wind chill weather.

He’d raise the box, hack away at the frozen earth, lower the box only to find it didn’t fit, raise it again and hack away more earth. Finally Keith gave up and pulled the box all the way out of the hole. He called the funeral home who called the grave digger, and together they jumped down and worked, spades in hand, on either side of Mack’s grave. Time was not exactly flying at we stood in the cold wind, so I’m guessing the too small hole added another two hours to the committal. Keith apologized but we didn’t care a bit. Peter simply joked about the stubborn earth mimicking the stubborn man about to placed into it.

Will it fit?

“Not a chance, Keith.”

Gaining access.

Keith works on one side and

Jim on the other.

I’m tired and I’m not sure how best to tell the rest of this story, so I’ll do what I always do when something feels too big. I’ll chop it into small pieces.

I’m happy Diane and Peter were part of this, and I wish Brian had been too. It still feels right that we brought Mack back to his roots, to the hardscrabble area in which he grew up. And it felt right that the only other people present were the grave digger and the man hired to provide the concrete box and lower Mack into the ground.

Leaving the Best Western in El Dorado.

Arriving for our meeting with Lionell at Carlson’s in Eldorado.

Lionell and Mack’s temporary grave marker.

Near Latham, Kansas.

Next: What happens when the grave is too small.

To those whose email’s are bouncing back please use michael at vanishingreality.com (at used here instead of @ to thwart the spam bots)

Look, I know this has become a macabre, deeply black-humored, morbidly fascinating event, but the fact that I too can laugh along with everyone else doesn’t mean I miss my father any less. But how the hell else can one cope with all this? With a straight face? I don’t think so.

We filled our tank for the second time just south of Kansas City and I turned to the pregnant woman sharing my pump and said, “This pump is so slow.”

“Maybe because we’re both using it?” She answered.

“Come on, it has to be able to handle both of us.”

To which she said, “You must not be from around here. I’m guessing one of the coasts. Everything is slow here.”

From there we talked about her trip to the west coast, her return to Kansas, why I’m in such a hurry and of course to what’s inside my van.

Her parting words before she climbed back into her car?

“So, do you look over and say, ‘Gee dad, you’ve been really quiet lately?’ ”

We arrived in El Dorado around 8 PM, just nine hours after we left Evansville. It’s been a real easy trip with me sleeping next to a driving Diane, while Peter naps with his head on the casket.

Diane and Peter approaching The Best Western in El Dorado.

The back of our van. That is a blanket on top of the casket. It’s disheveled as if we’re ambivalent about whether my father needs to be kept warm or not. To the right of him is our travel cooler loaned to us by Jeff and Karen.

We’ll be stopping in Nevada, Missouri on our way back to Evansville. After spending some of Thursday touring metropolitan Latham, I thought it only made sense to visit the town where my mother grew up. I haven’t been to Latham since 1985, or Nevada since the early seventies when I helped Peter drive out to California to attend the University of the Pacific.

We’ll be flying home on Saturday.

I

A couple days ago:

Diane: “I can’t believe Mack is really dead.”

Brian: “Spend ten hours in a van with him in a casket and you’ll believe it.”

We’ve reserved a Chrysler Town & Country which has seats that will fold down into the floor, leaving enough room for my father, Diane, Peter and me. I did check on the cargo area, and I was assured there would be enough, not for a casket, or “casket-sized steamer trunk,” but for a “large box about seven feet long.”

We’ve scheduled a service for 10 AM Thursday morning, after which the company that provides the vault will lower Mack into the ground. Our next stop – The Best Western in El Dorado, Kansas on Wednesday night.

Dear Mack,

My guess is that you are now puzzling over the ultimate puzzle, deriving the simultaneous equations in n dimensions that would explain how it is that you can still *be*, though your body has expired. And how it can be that your treasured 1950s high school math text harbored not a clue about this larger reality? However, if you think about it, the protagonist of your other favorite book, Flatland, one A Squared, did once try to explain this to you. Remember when he described the visitation of a 3-dimensional sphere as it passed through the two-dimensional space of his native land?

Those of us remaining in 3-D while you hover in the nth are left to ponder and process the entangled threads of existence that we are woven into. We are left to follow the threads, or not, back through time, to solve the puzzles of our lives, or not, and vow to make better places for those that follow us, or not. Despite the ancestral psychodramas that we get entangled in, we know somewhere inside ourselves that, in fact, all we do is the best we can.

Mack, I want you to know that I am grateful to you for co-creating with Helen my best friend Michael, whose essence is the distillation of much the best of both of you. He has unraveled so much, and he daily makes a better place for all around him. I can suppose that you knew he was coming to visit you again, and timed your departure to coincide, looking to minimize the burden all around. Michael loves you, as do Joan, Brian, and Peter. My wish is that your departure can ease all their burdens, that they can reconcile their different ways of trying to take care of you, and simply grieve your passing together.

Good bye Mack. I’ll long remember your math puzzles, your warm greeting when I arrived at your home last July when Helen passed, and your unique semi-stuttering speech and oblique wit.

Oh yes: You’ll be delighted to know that Oracle was up 37 cents on your last day!

..Dan

Dear Mack,

My guess is that you are now puzzling over the ultimate puzzle, deriving the simultaneous equations in n dimensions that would explain how it is that you can still *be*, though your body has expired. And how it can be that your treasured 1950s high school math text harbored not a clue about this larger reality? However, if you think about it, the protagonist of your other favorite book, Flatland, one A Squared, did once try to explain this to you. Remember when he described the visitation of a 3-dimensional sphere as it passed through the two-dimensional space of his native land?

Those of us remaining in 3-D while you hover in the nth are left to ponder and process the entangled threads of existence that we are woven into. We are left to follow the threads, or not, back through time, to solve the puzzles of our lives, or not, and vow to make better places for those that follow us, or not. Despite the ancestral psychodramas that we get entangled in, we know somewhere inside ourselves that, in fact, all we do is the best we can.

Mack, I want you to know that I am grateful to you for co-creating with Helen my best friend Michael, whose essence is the distillation of much the best of both of you. He has unraveled so much, and he daily makes a better place for all around him. I can suppose that you knew he was coming to visit you again, and timed your departure to coincide, looking to minimize the burden all around. Michael loves you, as do Joan, Brian, and Peter. My wish is that your departure can ease all their burdens, that they can reconcile their different ways of trying to take care of you, and simply grieve your passing together.

Good bye Mack. I’ll long remember your math puzzles, your warm greeting when I arrived at your home last July when Helen passed, and your unique semi-stuttering speech and oblique wit.

Oh yes: You’ll be delighted to know that Oracle was up 37 cents on your last day!

..Dan

Diane’s voice embellishes her wonderful writing. I wish you all could have heard her last night.

Last nights service for my father in Matt’s words: “More than exhausting, it was draining.”

Eulogy: Malcolm Geeslin Miller
08/31/1914-02/02/2007

My father in law spoke to us in riddles, but there was a period in the 70s when he was pushed to change by his early retirement from Westinghouse and we were young adults trying to figure out what the heck we were doing.

Mack and Helen would drive out to Boston regularly where 3 or 4 of his children were residing at any point, and he would graciously participate in something we called non-optional group therapy, where we would get together to dissect our hang-ups and blame our elders. Mack acknowledged at that time some of the ways in which he had been not an easy father and joined in a hippie generation dialogue I imagine and hope he never forgot.

But in later life, Mack retreated from public introspection and again engaged mostly around mathematics, mechanics or finances. Mack didn’t exactly know what to say to his grandson Matthew, who didn’t speak any of those. There was one moment, though, when their thoughts connected.

Matt was 8 when he suddenly understood what a pulley could do for you. He wanted one very badly. Shortly, a large and shiny pulley arrived in the mail from Mack. Bolted to Matt’s bedroom ceiling it allowed him to hoist himself up into the air to perch and read for hours.

That’s one of my fond memories from Matthew’s childhood, which was so very different from his grandfather’s. For instance, my son’s Dad broke through that same ceiling a few years later to build him a loft with a skylight. Mack, on the other hand, built himself an unheated garage to provide sleeping space there in the cold prairie winters with some of his siblings. Prior to that, his parents, Archie and Jesse and their 7 children slept together in their 3 room rural Kansas house.

One of Mack’s younger sisters Betty Jean, who idolized him, told a story about Mack’s coming to her with a thread and needle when he cut his arm through to the bone with his knife during a hunting accident. He was about 16, she about 12, and he talked her through sewing him back together.

Mack’s children plan to drive his body home to Latham Kansas this week, to lay him between his grandfather Ackless who fought in the civil war, and his mother Jesse who died when Mack was too young a man. It was a hard life in Latham, but it was part of what made Mack who he was, brave, competent, frugal, an extraordinary improviser, always generous with his helping hand, full of integrity by which I mean speaking and living his values, a man of halting words but vigorous effective action who mowed his lawn and cleaned his gutters to the end.

Diane M Canning
02/05/2007

Diane’s voice embellishes her wonderful writing. I wish you all could have heard her last night.

Last nights service for my father in Matt’s words: “More than exhausting, it was draining.”

Eulogy: Malcolm Geeslin Miller
08/31/1914-02/02/2007

My father in law spoke to us in riddles, but there was a period in the 70s when he was pushed to change by his early retirement from Westinghouse and we were young adults trying to figure out what the heck we were doing.

Mack and Helen would drive out to Boston regularly where 3 or 4 of his children were residing at any point, and he would graciously participate in something we called non-optional group therapy, where we would get together to dissect our hang-ups and blame our elders. Mack acknowledged at that time some of the ways in which he had been not an easy father and joined in a hippie generation dialogue I imagine and hope he never forgot.

But in later life, Mack retreated from public introspection and again engaged mostly around mathematics, mechanics or finances. Mack didn’t exactly know what to say to his grandson Matthew, who didn’t speak any of those. There was one moment, though, when their thoughts connected.

Matt was 8 when he suddenly understood what a pulley could do for you. He wanted one very badly. Shortly, a large and shiny pulley arrived in the mail from Mack. Bolted to Matt’s bedroom ceiling it allowed him to hoist himself up into the air to perch and read for hours.

That’s one of my fond memories from Matthew’s childhood, which was so very different from his grandfather’s. For instance, my son’s Dad broke through that same ceiling a few years later to build him a loft with a skylight. Mack, on the other hand, built himself an unheated garage to provide sleeping space there in the cold prairie winters with some of his siblings. Prior to that, his parents, Archie and Jesse and their 7 children slept together in their 3 room rural Kansas house.

One of Mack’s younger sisters Betty Jean, who idolized him, told a story about Mack’s coming to her with a thread and needle when he cut his arm through to the bone with his knife during a hunting accident. He was about 16, she about 12, and he talked her through sewing him back together.

Mack’s children plan to drive his body home to Latham Kansas this week, to lay him between his grandfather Ackless who fought in the civil war, and his mother Jesse who died when Mack was too young a man. It was a hard life in Latham, but it was part of what made Mack who he was, brave, competent, frugal, an extraordinary improviser, always generous with his helping hand, full of integrity by which I mean speaking and living his values, a man of halting words but vigorous effective action who mowed his lawn and cleaned his gutters to the end.

Diane M Canning
02/05/2007

I like Jen’s comment. Judging by everyone’s reaction around here, I guess this burial method is rather novel.

Anyway, I talked to both funeral homes this morning and the current plan is to pick-up my father in a rented mini van (extended version as the casket is 7’9″ long) on Wednesday morning, and drive him to Eldorado, Ks.. Wednesday night Diane and I (and maybe Peter, maybe not) will find a motel leaving the casket in the van in the motel parking lot. Thursday morning we’ll drive the thirty miles to Latham for the burial.

Sunday morning, early, I went back to Deaconess Hospital, walked through the familiar foyer, and the lobby where I’d waited, slept and composed my thoughts, and up the back steps to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. I found Genny (short for Genevieve), one of Mack’s many nurses, tending to a patient on dialysis. I thanked her for what she’d done for my father and she bounced it back like the professional she is – thanking me and reassuring me that Mack was in a better place with God. Around here folks share their religion like last night’s football score.

I left and then dropped-in on Peter, and then Jeff and Karen, and then drove back for a 9 AM breakfast at the Marriott with Diane. The rest of the day Diane and I stayed close, meandering the back streets, napping together in the car in our favorite coffee house’s parking lot, and stopping at Borders for books. At night we met Peter and Brian for dinner and then headed back to Bellemeade to collect clothes to dress my father for our trip west. Tough stuff, sorting through his torn and stained jeans, finding the right flannel shirt, gathering underwear that wouldn’t be embarrassing to hand to the funeral director and his son. My depression-era father wore clothes until the bitter end, not unlike, now that I think about it, my friend and camping companion, Mark Queijo.

I was doing okay in this house of memories until I saw tears streaming down Diane’s cheeks as we walked together into my mother’s rooms where she wasn’t, and my father’s bedroom where he wasn’t. Too much past tense in that house.

Today, we’ll finish preparations for tonight’s service — Sarah’s coming to play her cello – and I’ll call Kansas to tell them we’ll be there to bury my father on Thursday.

****************

Dan called this morning to say he’d slipped on the ice on his driveway and broken his leg.

Last night Jeff and Karen took us to the Firefly Grill. We ate fried okra, fried green tomatoes, fried grits, pulled pork, grilled chicken salad, tomato soup (with a tiny cheese sandwich floating in the center) and a crab cake, all finished with a slice of rich coconut cream pie drizzeled with caramel. We touched on family issues, some messy ones, but most importantly Jeffrey helped Matt understand the complex man who was his grandfather.

Today is our day of rest.

Written by Diane.