Elegy with blue shirt, tie and gun: in this short story, a father's death brings his children more questions than answers.(FICTION)

There are ties here. I know it.

My old man was a packrat--it was against his nature to throw anything away. He died, suddenly, peacefully and in his sleep in April 1996, while my 7-year-old son and I were visiting my parents at their retirement home in Virginia. When I found him that morning, he looked like a slumbering Krishna, his flesh a hardened indigo. He was wearing the soft, well-worn blue cotton shirt he'd put on the day before.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My mother has decided she wants an open-casket funeral, and we debate what clothes to send to the funeral home. A suit seems too formal for Dad's style, an aloha shirt too casual. Rummaging through his bedroom closet, we find a new dress shirt, still fresh in its package. Just right. Dad used to wear that kind of shirt, along with a tie, when he worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. But, no matter how hard we look in the closet, we can't find a single tie.

"I'm tired," my mother says. Her skin looks deflated. We're all in shock, and she has large-cell lymphoma--the treatments make her tired even under the best of circumstances.

"Go and rest," I tell her.

Alone, I continue the search for my father's ties. My parents have been sleeping in separate rooms since my mother's cancer was diagnosed. She's gotten so thin that the box-spring mattress hurts her. She sleeps on top of a thick piece of pocketed foam on a bed in the guest room. My mother would go into the master bedroom and change the sheets on the double bed where she used to sleep with Dad and vacuum the floor when he was out mowing the lawn.