A lot of people talked at my father’s funeral. That’s what he wanted. He didn’t want any stiff sermons and dropping to your knees every few minutes. He wanted stories about better times and drinking after a short service. “Just enough to get me in the door,” he told me. Guys talked about what a tough boss he was, but how he wouldn’t have anyone do anything he wouldn’t do himself. “He had me go around a job site and pick up all the unused brick,” Pete Tejada said, a smile already creasing his face. The masons always left bricks at the job site. My father had them picked up and stacked so they could be used again, instead of carted off and used on some other job. “So, I’m out there, just a kid trying to make an easy buck” (which got a good laugh), “cursing this guy who’s making me walk around picking up trash bricks, when I see him behind me, picking up half bricks. I look at him and he holds one up and he says, ‘I got to pick up twice as many to keep up with you.’ He outworked me every day,” Pete said. “And always had a smile on his face.” There were a lot of stories like that about my father. There weren’t any about Frank, at least none said at the front of the church where everyone could hear. Except from Casey.

At the end, the priest acknowledged that he didn’t know Frank, so had his sister come up and talk about her brother. She talked about the hurt he had caused in his life and the struggles he tried to put behind him. “Addiction is a disease that affects more than just the addict,” she said. “It affects everyone the addict comes in contact with, family, friends, colleagues, everybody. It’s like a rock that gets thrown in the water and the ripples go out and out. Frank told me that. He knew the ripples he had caused, the damage his behavior had done not only to himself, but to everyone he knew. That’s why when he got sober he tried to be a different kind of rock, to create different ripples. He wasn’t part of my life for a long time, too long, but we had reconnected not long ago,” she said. “We talked at least once a week and texted more than that. He was in a good place, I thought, better than he’d been in a long time, maybe better than he’d ever been. Maybe it wasn’t enough. There are people here who know him better than I do. Maybe you know different than I do. All I know is that he wasn’t always a good person, but he was trying to be a better one. You can’t ask for much more from someone.”