Wallis had recently finished her teaching contract in South Korea, but she’d been planning to travel through the fall; when we’d gotten ahold of her, it was via a hostel’s landline somewhere south of Ho Chi Minh City. She landed at Dulles seventy-two hours later with barely enough time to splash water on her face and under her arms before we were off to Richmond to view our father lying in state, then back to DC, to the Capitol, where more mourners waited in line for hours to pay their respects to the distinguished yet down-to-earth senator who considered public service a higher calling, but never missed an opportunity to crack a disarming, cheesy joke or get on the dance floor with moves less embarrassing than one might expect. Even when you disagreed with him, the consensus around DC was you couldn’t help but think of him as a friend.

A month had passed by the time we organized his public funeral at the Cathedral, a massive see-and-be-seen kind of affair, a competition of: Who was my father closest to? Who was the saddest? Who would miss him the most? People had networked in the pews. The Secret Service had been there, and so had the television cameras.

I’d already returned to work at that point—Cricket had considered it quick, my decision rash, but I had been determined to carry on my father’s legacy—and the planning involved in his send-off had become like a second job. We had to do all the important rituals, and then some, to honor his life, mark our loss, and publicly acknowledge our shift from one type of family to another. In the flood of flowers and tributes and personal notes and Did I wear this dress already?, I’d barely had time to process his death. So when Cricket and Wallis wept through the eulogy, given by a senior statesmen, I was too numbed to produce a single tear. As booming as the eulogist’s voice was, my father’s voice, in my head, had been louder: Jesus, Daisy, he said. You know how to cry on cue. I was the one to teach you. People will think you’re glad that I’m gone.