[ WP ] 95 year old man goes to the funeral of the man his deceased wife left him for decades ago . He did n't want to go but this man was the last person he had a tangible connection to . All of his other family , friends and acquaintances already died .

Back when I was small, just a tiny, skinny kid in Maryland, my father walked through the door with smokey patches of soot all along his workshirt, his coveralls torn up on the left strap and like a grisly cloth wound on his side. Our dark little house, no electricity, had one lamp over on the corner table where my mom was moving our dinner plates. They had tough lives. We smiled even when there was n't a whole lot to smile about, and there rarely was. And yet somehow, I have never seen a man whose face looked more stern and hollow than I did on that night, a man who looked as if he had stared into a pit blacker than you can imagine, and realized something horrible about life that had seemed so unbelievable before. Something that makes your brows feel like they're holding 100 pound weights, as I had imagined hung low over his eyes, when I saw my father after my uncle died. 
 
 I was young, but I knew. They did n't tell you. It was n't proper for a kid to know, but I did. My sisters did n't. My older brother just looked deflated, or maybe he was shocked. I do n't remember except that he was upset. It was long ago. 
 
 My father watched my uncle, his only surviving brother to that point, get twisted apart by machinery until his insides hung out like salamis from meat hooks. He was a handsome guy, straight nose, superbly cropped head of hair, but now his cheery personality was gone for good, the one personality trait I can surely say I remember about him. Apparently he would take me to skip stones on the cattail lake, and one time I hit a goose and he cheered rapturously, I was told by neighbors. 
 
 And somehow he lived for some minutes, speaking obscure things about Jesus and Abraham, and being `` born to trouble''. I learned about that years and years later, from a guy who worked with them until they had all gone grey, the ones who got out from under the heavy wheel of drudgery in at least one piece. `` Yet man is born unto trouble, as surely as sparks fly upward,''. Job. In his suffering, that's the one that came to his fading mind. I do n't know enough about the Bible to say exactly why. 
 
 When my mother had stopped crying, wiping her eyes into a big stain on the front of her robin's egg-blue dress, the one I thought made her auburn hair look the prettiest together, my father was on a rocking chair near the corner. He was just a haunting, tall silhouette. His work boots were still on and he held a glass of whiskey. That's what I think, it must've been a bourbon, we did n't have aluminum cans that you can toss around like a football. My father never drank. 
 
 I went over to get a kiss goodnight, and his hand came reached out in the dark and patted my ragged hair softly. I ca n't remember if he was silently crying. But I know for sure, he was thinking of the kids he had grown up with got shot through with little pinballs in the first World War, the ones who were n't blood related and the three who were. There was two left at the end, and now at another ending, there is one. 
 
 And he said to me, just before I walked away to go and dream, something I could never quite shake off. And all the details I've said might be hogwash, some of them might be just bologna. But this one is true, a hundred percent true, that he looked at me through tired eyes and said, `` I never wanted to be the last man standing.'' 
 
 He went off to sleep eventually, I assume, and he absolutely never spoke of my uncle again. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

