Waking up the dead is about one of the hardest things to do–especially after you’ve just laid them to rest. The soul, it was once believed, hovered about the body for three or four days, after which it departed to go into the netherworld of the afterlife. Funny, those words are: “netherworld,” “afterlife.” Very direct and on the nose, puns about death. But he lay there with no life in his veins, as all the blood had run cold. Death was just the doorway through which he would eschew life.

Now, I was about to wake him up, but seeing as he was lying there so peacefully, I thought better of it: better to let sleeping dogs lie, they always say. In this moment, he was not coming back, especially seeing as he had been dead for some time.

The nature of his burial is a curious one, which I cannot at this time go into, but suffice it to say, he was left in the morgue longer than would be comfortable for anyone, living or dead. Once I had procured the appropriate documents to bury him, I had the grand privilege of obtaining a spot in which to bury him.

This was no easy process, tedious as the bureaucratic red tape was. I had to prove our relations, that he was my father. I had to prove his death, time of death, cause of death, manner of death, place and location of death. It was almost the death of me to deal with his untimely death.

Father had never shown any signs of the wear and tear of time in aging. His mind was a sharp as a tack. His eyes gleamed with the brilliance of life. His voice echoed with the curious joy of a gleeful child. If he ever had any pain, he never let on about it.

When he died, it was sudden, shocking, disproportionate to the life he lived, momentous as he was a man: whenever he entered a room or any place, he filled the whole space with his very momentous presence of joy. It was pure delight and pure life that he brought to the any scene. Thus, his death was unbecoming to his life, for he had lived as if he would never die, never age, never go down.

The moment I buried him in his recently procured grave, which, I might add, was in a well-manicured garden of the cemetery at the base of the hill, overlooking the ocean from a cliff, I felt a tear shed. It was one single, solitary tear, for the father I had once had, once enjoyed, once known. Now, all I knew was a body in a coffin in the dirt.

“Farewell, Father,” was all I could eek out in a whisper.

Turning, I left the groundskeeper to finalize his burial, and went to wash my hand of the dirt I had dropped on his coffin.