A black dress and funeral blues
KATE WILLIAMS

Kate Williams is a Port Aransas mom. She and her husband are the parents of an 8-year-old son and 7-year-old twin boys. Contct her at darwinjw@centurytel.net

I unfolded the black dress from the bag it had been in for three months. It sat on a chair by the front door, where I put it when I unpacked the car from our trip in January. I had not looked at the dress I wore to my father's funeral since I took it off that day. I couldn't do it. And I haven't written a word since then. But today was the day. I looked at the care instructions on the tag. It would have to be washed by hand. I took a deep breath. And remembered.

My sister, brother and I convened at my oldest brother's house the night before my father's services. It was my older sister's idea. "Some of us haven't seen each other in years," she said. "We need to get that out of the way so we're not doing that in front of everybody at the church." She was right, of course. But the rest of us hadn't thought of it. We were all just concerned with getting through the weekend.

I arrived first. My brother was busy putting together pictures of our father in a collection of frames to be displayed at the services. There were some pictures I hadn't seen since I was a child. We talked about how handsome he was. We went through a box of personal items. His reading glasses. A pen. Cuff links. His wedding rings. Not from his current marriage. From his marriage to my mother. He had saved them. The original band and the replacement band they had gotten together decades later. My brother handed them to me. "I don't know what to do with these," he said. "Will you take them?" I did. I put them in my pocket.

Our brother appeared at the front door. They shook hands, but couldn't do so without arguing. "Don't break my hand, Kyle!" the older said to the younger, complaining that his grip was too harsh. And that set the stage between them for the entire weekend.

My older sister arrived. Everyone talked, our kids ran around and played with one another. We eventually ate dinner. My older brother had created the program and was working on the music for the service. He asked my advice on whether or not to put certain songs on the CD that would be playing the next morning. He showed me a newspaper article that had been written about my father when he was a 5-year-old newspaper boy. It was titled "Danny Boy." I had never read it before, although it was legendary on my father's side of the family. It described him as a good and responsible Catholic boy, taking care of his siblings while his mother worked and his father was away at war. Reading about my father as a little boy - not far in age from my own sons - was hard. Tears came. I don't know that my brother had ever seen me cry as an adult.

There was drama that night. My brothers argued over the music to be used. My niece said something that my brother thought was disrespectful and couldn't get over it, threatening to leave that night and not stay for the services. My sister fell apart, called my mom, and between the three of us we convinced him to stay. It was so important to my sister that we all be there. A united front.

The services were difficult. There were so many people from the last 10 years of his life and so few from the first 62. So few people knew us, his children, and our mother. And I recognized so few faces.

My sister and I sat together in the front row, across the aisle from my father's wife. Our oldest brother sat next to her. Our other brother stayed in the back of the church. My oldest brother spoke and was choked up. My sister and I cried. There was time allotted for anyone who chose to come forward and speak. Unplanned, I did. I had to get up and balance the recollections others had of my father in his last years with some from the majority of his life. The man I knew was not the same as the one they knew. And when it was over, faces from my childhood greeted me, two friends of my sister's that I had not seen since high school. I clung to them and cried fresh tears for someone who had known us when we were a family - all together. A few others came up to me that I did not recognize, but told me stories about me as a little girl. They knew me. And my mother. They knew who my father had been.

Afterwards, I was exhausted. I let my husband drive me to his parents' house in Houston where we were staying. I crawled into bed in the middle of the day with the biggest migraine I'd had in years. I talked to my oldest brother the next day. He had done the same in his own bed, but with a bowl of ice cream for good measure.

We recovered. Slowly but surely. But I can just now write about it. And I still have not washed that black dress.