My brother-in-law’s funeral was awkward and wonderful. “Awkward” because Gregorys are both tightly-bond and distant–we don’t get together often– given childhoods marked by confusion, by alcohol and an unerring moral compass, by violence and inspired moments of love, by the imperative of survival and the depth of our pride in our parents, who remain the most singular and brilliant human beings I’ve ever known.

But we come together when we need to. We don’t talk much about what we feel for each other because proximity alone is so powerful. The pride we had in our parents is now manifest in the way we feel about each other: We are alive. We made it.

We didn’t know most of the people at Billy’s ceremony well, but the ones we remembered—sons and grandsons, soft-voiced and boulder-strong, beautiful daughters and granddaughters, blondes—came up to us without hesitating and embraced us.

These were the children my sister, Roberta, helped to raise as if they were her own.

All of them, boys and girls, children and grandchildren, no matter how hard the lives they’ve lived, are marked by a kind of bedrock integrity that Billy left for them, as if it were as genetic as brown eyes.

 

 

You can’t help but love them.

The ones we didn’t remember weren’t relatives at all: they were cowboys Billy had hired –as skilled with a welding torch (the water-pipes on the ranch freeze in cold Bakersfield winters) as they are with gentling horses–or homeless veterans he’d taken in and so saved their lives.  There were at least sixty stories like his, one of the veterans told me.

 

 

As is always the case, the humans weren’t the only ones present. Several dogs trotted up to the planting with the humans and looked for solace there, too, rubbing up against the friendly guests and nuzzling the ones who needed comfort. A pony whinnied in the distance without Billy there to see if he might be colicky. No fewer than four vintage Ford garden tractors, in various stages of repair or mortality, were a reminder of the briefness of life.

Bill’s girls talked about Dad and Grandpa (he was plain-spoken and cranky, soft-hearted and fiercely protective) the boys talked a little too, some of them in elongated Ozark Plateau vowels that I recognize almost instantly, once the warmth of my heart has relayed the sound to my brain, and then they took up shovels and mixed Billy’s ashes in the roots of a sycamore they were planting in a riverbank along the Kern, which straddles the ranch.

Given the now-giant sycamore planted nearby for Billy’s son, killed years ago in a tule-fog car wreck, this tree will be strong, like that boy was, and it’s on a little rise where Billy can look over the 250 horses he cared for so much.

My big sister put a little packet in the roots and I didn’t for a minute think of asking what that was about. My big sister was always so big to me and in the funeral’s aftermath I realized how small she is (so was my mother, another giant and powerful influence on my life.)

 

 

What her daughters and granddaughters did for my sister was perfect, too.

Roberta has a little girl, a border collie puppy not yet weaned from her own mother, coming to her late Christmas, and that’s is just what she wanted: Someone to take care of, the way she took care of us when our Mom died, the way she took care of Billy, the way Billy will always take care of her.

Once the boys had the tree seated and upright, secure and settled, they planed a pretty little well around it with the flats of their shovel blades and the soles of their boots. My brother-in-law’s funeral was awkward and wonderful, and in every way it was perfect.