Returning at last to the day of the funeral! Please pardon my tendency to explore the byways--sometimes those are the best part of life.

We had asked family and friends back to our house. As is usual for Richard and me at parties, we were the last people out of the luncheon, pretty much (though many remained to clean up, thank you so much guys!). We headed home, where I took off my purple suit, originally purchased that fall for a wedding, and put on jeans. The last of the ceremonies was over, and now it was time to wrap up and say goodby to the family and friends who had turned out to support us through that week. We sat and ate and drank a little wine: Richard and and our friend Harry sat in the backyard and drank Scotch and smoked cigars, something they do on special occasions. We caught up with people we hadn't seen in years, and watched as members of the various circles of our life overlapped for the first time. I kept thinking, if only this had been a wedding instead.

On Saturday, we got up and went to a local big box hardware store to find out why we still had not gotten the storm door we had ordered several weeks before any of this happened. It sounds kind of stupid and irrelevant, but we knew it was time to try to take up normal life again, at least a little bit. My sister and her husband were still with us and, since they remodel their own home perpetually, we knew they would be up for this expedition. We ran into a fellow parishioner there, also in pursuit of a delayed order, and she told us how beautiful she had found Thomas's funeral. Our door order was located and we finished up. I don't remember much of the rest of the day, though that night we had dinner with many of Anna's high school friends who had come, many of them, a long way to be with us. The restaurant was Thai and there was a large American flag on the wall. I kept wanting to toast Thomas's memory but decided that it could not come from me and might be hard on everyone else. So it didn't happen.