Submitted by Marnie — Youngstown, Ohio. 49. My mother kept the funeral guest books in the bottom of the china cabinet, spines out, like a row of hymnals. That was just a thing our family did. Every viewing came with a book. You signed it going in, the funeral home handed it back after, and my mother filed it with the others. I never thought it was strange. I figured every family had a shelf like that. My boss came to my grandfather's funeral. I was twenty-three, four months into the job, and I remember being grateful, because I didn't know bosses don't usually do that. He stood at the back of the funeral home in Youngstown, signed the book, shook my father's hand, and left before the luncheon. My father said, that's a good man you work for. I agreed. I had nothing to compare him to. He came to my grandmother's, two years later. He came to my uncle Ray's, and to my aunt Diane's out in Florida, and to a cousin I was barely close to. Every time, he stood at the back in the same dark coat. Every time, he signed the book on its little brass stand by the door. And every time somebody in my family would lean over and say, isn't that something, that he came all this way, and I'd say, oh, that's just how he is. I want to be clear that I never told him when any of it happened. My family is scattered — half aren't in Ohio at all — and the deaths didn't go through the office. An aunt outside Tampa. A cousin near Pittsburgh. My uncle Ray three hours from anywhere. I'd put in for the bereavement days and he'd approve them without a word, and then he would be there, at the back of a funeral home four states from where I worked. I told myself he read the obituaries. I don't remember deciding that. It's the kind of thing you decide once, early, and never think to check again. He retired when I was thirty-nine, and I figured that was the end of it. It wasn't. He came to my father's funeral two years later, older and thinner, there in the back in the coat. One of my cousins asked who he was. I said, that's my old boss, he's very kind — and even as I said it I heard how thin it sounded, a retired man driving through a February storm to a viewing for a man he had never actually met. My mother died in March. By then I was forty-nine and he had to be past eighty. I hadn't laid eyes on him in ten years. But he was there, at the back of the same Youngstown funeral home, in the same coat, leaning on a cane. He came up the receiving line slowly, took my hand, and did not say he was sorry for my loss. He looked past me at the book on its stand and he said, your mother always set out a nice book. Then he said, I've signed every one. I laughed. You laugh at a funeral when your face doesn't know what else to do. I said something like, well, you've been so good to this family. And he looked at me a beat too long, and he said it again, quieter, the way you correct someone who has misheard you. Every one. Then he leaned down, signed my mother's book in that slow careful hand, and left before the luncheon, the way he always did. That night I took the books out of the china cabinet and stood them on the table, all of them, going back further than I do. My grandfather's. A great-aunt's, from 1958. A great-uncle I've seen in one photograph, who died when my mother was a little girl — before the company, before the job, before me. And his name is in every single one of them, near the bottom of the page, in that same unhurried hand, always the back-of-the-room signature of a man who came and signed and left. I don't know what to do with that. I keep looking for the version where it's ordinary. I've asked the aunts. Nobody knows him. Nobody ever did. He was just always the man at the back who signed the book, and we were all so busy being grateful that in sixty years not one of us ever thought to ask him to sit down.
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