When my father lay dying, his one regret was that the Whitney family had gone five generations without a daughter to mourn him at his funeral.
My fiancée knelt at his bedside, holding his hand, and swore:
"Dad, a daughter-in-law is no different from a real daughter. I'm going to arrange the wedding and marry Eric Whitney right away!"
"You just focus on getting well and doing what the doctors say. I'll be here to care for you in your old age and see you off when the time comes. Your best days are still ahead of you!"
But my father didn't live to see me take a wife. He slipped away with Miranda Rowe's name on his lips.
At the end, without one last look at his daughter-in-law, he refused to close his eyes.
Only when Miranda, tears in her eyes, promised she would mourn him at the funeral did he finally let them shut.
On the day of the funeral, Miranda was nowhere to be found.
I called her, and she said:
"Michael Dickerson has cancer. He's heartbroken that we never finished the ten little things I once promised him. I'll come back the moment I've done every last one of them with him!"
I forced down my grief and anger and reminded her:
"Today is my father's funeral. You promised to mourn for him. You can't let him die with that regret unfulfilled!"
On the other end I heard Michael coughing hard, and Miranda snapped, all patience gone:
"What's a dead man's regret next to a dying man's last wish? Just put Dad on ice for now. What I promised him, marrying you, mourning at his funeral, I'll make good on all of it when I get back!"
1
Her words turned me cold all over.
Before I could get a word out, I heard Michael ask her:
"Miranda, are you sure it's really fine that you're not going back? What if Eric gets angry? Your wedding is right around the corner..."
Miranda cut him off, her voice gentle:
"What has he got to be angry about? The old man has no choice but to wait in that freezer for me to come back. Unless Eric can produce a blood daughter to mourn the old man out of thin air! Michael, you're not well, don't trouble yourself over things you shouldn't. His father is waiting for me to mourn him, he's got no family left, and he's waiting for me to marry him too. As long as he's not a fool, he knows what he has to do!"
Miranda was so busy soothing Michael that she forgot to hang up.
I couldn't believe those were words the woman I'd loved for eight years, the woman I was about to marry, could say out loud.
The whole funeral runs five hours at the very most, and the mourning rite itself takes only half an hour.
Miranda wouldn't even give my father that half hour.
Then how many of the undying vows she'd once made me could she possibly keep?
My hand shaking, I ended the call.
She was right. I couldn't produce a blood daughter for my father out of thin air. But a daughter-in-law wasn't hard to find.
I looked up, toward the woman who'd been running herself ragged for me not far off.
She was bowing to the family and friends who had come to say their goodbyes to the body.
This was supposed to be Miranda's job. Yet here was Cecily Delgado, doing it without a word of complaint.
Feeling my eyes on her, Cecily finished thanking the last of them and hurried over.
"Eric, did you get through? When is your fiancée coming? The viewing is over. Next is the mourning and breaking the bowl, then we take your father for cremation and burial."
I looked at the fine beads of sweat on Cecily's forehead, at the red rims of her eyes, and said softly:
"Cecily, could you do the mourning? As my father's daughter-in-law?"
Her hand froze mid-wipe.
She understood what I hadn't said, and there was no joy on her face at all. Anger rose there instead.
"Where's Miranda? Your father only closed his eyes because she promised to mourn him like a devoted daughter, to see him off. What is she doing, vanishing now?"
I said nothing, and yet Cecily was angrier than I was.
My phone buzzed. It was Miranda.
I thought her conscience had woken up, that she wanted to come back and mourn my father.
I answered, and Michael's frantic voice came through:
"Eric, get to the hospital, fast, something's happened to Miranda!"
"What happened to her?"
"It's all my fault! Miranda was eating mango with me, and now she's in the hospital with a severe allergic reaction, they're trying to save her!"
I opened Michael's social media. His latest post was an intimate photo of him and Miranda cheek to cheek, eating mango.
The caption read:
*The first little thing she did with me: eat ten pounds of mango together!*
Miranda had liked it and commented:
*Eating your favorite mango with you, feeling your fear of death as my own, is my promise to you!*
In that moment my heart was like a plum steeping in ice water, sour and bitter all at once.
Miranda was the kind of person who couldn't touch mango at all.
And now, for her childhood friend, she was staking her own life to make good on a promise.
So she didn't even care about her own life. How could she ever have cared about my father's regret?
