Philip Roth - Everyman

There were two upright shovels with their blades in the large pile of earth to one side of the grave. He had thought they had been left there by the gravediggers, who would use them later to fill the grave. He had imagined that, as at his mother's funeral, each mourner would step up to the hole to throw a clump of dirt onto the coffin's lid, after which they would all depart for their cars. But his father had requested of the rabbi the traditional Jewish rites, and those, he now discovered, called for burial by the mourners and not by employees of the cemetery or anyone else. The rabbi had told Howie beforehand, but Howie, for whatever reason, hadn't told him, and so he was surprised now when his brother, handsomely dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, and shining black shoes, walked over to pull one of the shovels out of the pile, and then set out to fill the blade until it was brimming with dirt. Then he walked ceremoniously to the head of the grave, stood there a moment to think his thoughts, and, angling the shovel downward a little, let the dirt run slowly out. Upon landing on the wood cover of the coffin, it made the sound that is absorbed into one's being like no other. Howie returned to plunge the blade of the shovel into the crumbling pyramid of dirt that stood about four feet high. They were going to have to shovel that dirt back into the hole until his father's grave was level with the adjacent cemetery grounds.

It took close to an hour to move the dirt. The elderly among the relatives and friends, unable to wield a shovel, helped by throwing fistfuls of dirt onto the coffin, and he himself could do no more than that, and so it fell to Howie and Howie's four sons and his own two – the six of them all strapping men in their late twenties and early thirties – to do the heavy labor. In teams of two they stood beside the pile and, spadeful by spadeful, moved the dirt from the pile back into the hole. Every few minutes another team took over, and it seemed to him, at one point, as though this task would never end, as though they would be there burying his father forever. The best he could do to be as immersed in the burial's brutal directness as his brother, his sons, and his nephews was to stand at the edge of the grave and watch as the dirt encased the coffin. He watched till it reached the lid, which was decorated only with a carving of the Star of David, and then he watched as it began to cover the lid. His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears. He wanted to tell them to stop, to command them to go no further – he did not want them to cover his father's face and block the passages through which he sucked in life. I've been looking at that face since I was born – stop burying my father's face! But they had found their rhythm, these strong boys, and they couldn't stop and they wouldn't stop, not even if he hurled himself into the grave and demanded that the burial come to a halt. Nothing could stop them now. They would just keep going, burying him, too, if that was necessary to get the job done. Howie was off to the side, his brow covered with sweat, watching the six cousins athletically complete the job, with the goal in sight shoveling at a terrific pace, not like mourners assuming the burden of an archaic ritual but like old-fashioned workmen feeding a furnace with fuel.

Many of the elderly were weeping now and holding on to each other. The pyramid of dirt was gone. The rabbi stepped forward and, after carefully smoothing the surface with his bare hands, used a stick to delineate in the loose soil the dimensions of the grave.

He had watched his father's disappearance from the world inch by inch. He had been forced to follow it right to the end. It was like a second death, one no less awful than the first. Suddenly he was remembering the rush of emotion that carried him down and down into the layers of his life when, at the hospital, his father had picked up each of the three infant grandchildren for the first time, pondering Randy, then later Lonny, then finally Nancy with the same expressive gaze of baffled delight.

"Are you all right?" Nancy asked, putting her arms around him while he stood and looked at the lines the stick had made in the soil, drawn there as if for a children's game. He squeezed her tightly to him and said, "Yes, I'm all right." Then he sighed, even laughed, when he said, "Now I know what it means to be buried. I didn't till today." "I've never seen anything so chilling in my life," Nancy said. "Nor have I," he told her. "It's time to go," he said, and with him and Nancy and Howie in the lead, the mourners slowly departed, though he could not begin to empty himself of all that he'd just seen and thought, the mind circling back even as the feet walked away.

Because a wind had been blowing while the grave was being filled, he could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York.

For the next nine years his health remained stable. Twice he'd been blindsided by a crisis, but unlike the boy in the bed next to his, he'd been spared the disaster. Then in 1998, when his blood pressure began to mount and would not respond to changes in medication, the doctors determined that he had an obstruction of his renal artery, which fortunately had resulted so far in only a minor loss of kidney function, and he entered the hospital for a renal artery angioplasty. Yet again his luck held, and the problem was resolved with the insertion of a stent that was transported on a catheter maneuvered up through a puncture in the femoral artery and through the aorta to the occlusion.

He was sixty-five, newly retired, and by now divorced for the third time. He went on Medicare, began to collect Social Security, and sat down with his lawyer to write a will. Writing a will – that was the best part of aging and probably even of dying, the writing and, as time passed, the updating and revising and carefully reconsidered rewriting of one's will. A few years later he followed through on the promise he'd made to himself immediately after the 9/11 attacks and moved from Manhattan to the Starfish Beach retirement village at the Jersey Shore, only a couple of miles from the seaside town where his family had vacationed for a portion of every summer. The Starfish Beach condominiums were attractive shingled one-story houses with big windows and sliding glass doors that led to rear outdoor decks; eight units were attached to form a semicircular compound enclosing a shrubbery garden and a small pond. The facilities for the five hundred elderly residents who lived in these compounds, spread over a hundred acres, included tennis courts, a large common garden with a potting shed, a workout center, a postal station, a social center with meeting rooms, a ceramics studio, a woodworking shop, a small library, a computer room with three terminals and a common printer, and a big room for lectures and performances and for the slide shows that were offered by couples who had just returned from their travels abroad. There was a heated Olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool in the heart of the village as well as a smaller indoor pool, and there was a decent restaurant in the modest mall at the end of the main village street, along with a bookstore, a liquor store, a gift shop, a bank, a brokerage office, a realtor, a lawyer's office, and a gas station. A supermarket was only a short drive away, and if you were ambulatory, as most residents were, you could easily walk the half mile to the boardwalk and down to the wide ocean beach, where a lifeguard was on duty all summer long.