For six months my only view of the world had been the grey ocean around an oil platform, so when the helicopter finally set me down and I drove home to surprise Marianne, I was already rehearsing the look on her face.
I never got to see it. There were black ribbons tied to our porch railing. A hand-lettered sign on the door: In loving memory. Cars lined the whole street, and through the front window I could see people in dark clothes holding paper cups, moving the slow way people move at funerals.
My wife’s funeral. And no one had told me.
I don’t remember crossing the lawn. I remember my mother-in-law turning from the doorway, her face draining of color as if I were the ghost. “You’re supposed to be offshore,” she whispered — not you’re alive, not thank God. Just that I was in the wrong place.
They sat me down. There had been an accident, they said. A car, a river, a current too strong. The service had to happen fast because — and here everyone looked at their shoes — because of the condition of the… because it couldn’t wait.
The casket at the front of my own living room was closed. Sealed. A framed photo of Marianne smiled on top of it, one I didn’t recognize, taken somewhere I’d never been.
I stood up. The room went quiet. In the very back, near the kitchen, a woman I had never seen flinched when I spoke my wife’s name — flinched like she’d been caught.
“Open it,” I heard myself say. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “I want to see my wife. Open the casket.”
Nobody moved. My mother-in-law reached for my arm and I pulled it away. The stranger by the kitchen had gone white.
“Open it now,” I said again — and the funeral director, a small nervous man, finally stepped forward with a key.
- Ep 1 · I Came Home to My Own Wife’s Funeral — Episode 1: The Sealed Casket
- Ep 2 · I Came Home to My Own Wife’s Funeral — Episode 2: The Diner Four Hundred Miles Away
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