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as a father and a funeral director, new at making babies and at burying them, I would often wake in the middle of the night, sneak into the rooms where my sons and daughter slept, and bend to theircribsides to hear them breathe. It was enough. I did not need astronauts or presidents or doctors or lawyers. I only wanted them to breathe. Like my father, I had learned to fear.
    And, as my children grew, so too the bodies of dead boys and girls I was called upon to bury—infants becoming toddlers, toddlers becoming school children, children becoming adolescents, then teens, then young adults,whose parents I would know from the Little League or Brownies or PTA or Rotary or Chamber of Commerce. Because I would not keep in stock an inventory of children’s caskets, I’d order them, as the need arose, in sizes and half sizes from two foot to five foot six, oftenestimating the size of a dead child, not yet released from the county morgue, by the sizes of my own children, safe and thrivingand alive. And the caskets I ordered were invariably “purity and gold” with angels on the corners and shirred crepe interiors of powdery pink or baby blue. And I would never charge more than the wholesale cost of the casket and throw in our services free of charge with the hope in my heart that God would, in turn, spare me the hollowing grief of these parents.
    There were exceptions to the “purityand gold.” Once a man whose name I remember shot his two children, ages eight and four, while their mother waited tables up in town. Then he shot himself. We laid him out in an 18-gauge steel with the Last Supper on the handles and his daughter and his son in a matching casket together. The bill was never paid. She sold the house, skipped town. I never pursued it.
    And one Christmastide twin six-year-oldsfell through the ice on the river that divides this town. It ran through their backyard and no one knows if they went in together or one tried to save the other. But the first of the brothers was found the same day and the next one was found two days later, bobbed up downstream after the firemen broke up the ice by the dam. We put them in the one casket with two pillows, foot to foot—identicalin their new Oshkosh B’Gosh jeans and plaid shirts their mother had mail-ordered from Sears for Christmas. Their father, a young man then, aged overnight and died within five years of nothing so much as sorrow. Their mother got cancer and died after that of grief metastasized. The only one left, the twins’ older brother, who must be nearing thirty now, is long gone from this place.
    And I rememberthe poor man with the look of damage on him whose wife strangled their eight-year-old son with a belt. Then she wrote a fourteen-page suicide note, explaining why she felt her son, who had been slow to read, faced a lifetime of ridicule and failure she felt she was freeing him from. Then she took three dozen pills, lay down beside theboy, and died herself. First he selected a cherry casket andlaid them out together in it, the boy at rest under his mother’s arm. But before the burial, he asked to have the boy removed from the mother’s casket and placed in one of his own and buried in his own grave. I did as he instructed and thought it was sensible.
    So early on I learned my father’s fear. I saw in every move my children made the potentially lethal outcome. We lived in an old housenext door to the funeral home. The children grew up playing football in the side yard, roller skating in the parking lot, then skateboarding, riding bikes, then driving cars. When they were ten, nine, six, and four, their mother and I divorced. She moved away. I was “awarded” custody—four badly saddened kids I felt a failure towards. And though I was generally pleased with the riddance that divorceprovides—the marriage had become a painful case—I was suddenly aware that single parenting meant, among other things, one pair of eyes to watch out for one’s children with.