I asked my husband to stop our son’s friend before he reached the guest book.
“Please, Frank. Not today.”
We were twenty minutes from burying Matthew, our only son. He was twenty-four. His friend Ben stood inside the doors of our church in southern Indiana, wearing a red cotton dress and the brown work boots Matthew had helped him pick out.
Someone behind me whispered. Ben heard it. He folded his hands in front of him and stayed by the door.
My husband didn’t move.
“Let me talk to him,” I said.
Ben and Matthew had worked together at an auto-parts store since graduation. Ben was usually the quiet one, the boy who washed the dishes after supper while Matthew argued with his father about baseball.
He had called twice since the accident. I hadn’t answered. There were only so many times I could bear to hear someone say my son’s name.
Now I walked toward him with Matthew’s funeral program crumpling in my hand.
“Why would you wear that here?”
Ben looked down at the dress. A strip of red ribbon had been threaded through one belt loop where the tie was missing.
“I know how it looks, Mrs. Harris.”
“Then you should understand why I’m asking.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He didn’t defend himself. That made it harder to say what I had rehearsed on the walk down the aisle.
Behind him, an usher reached for the door.
“Wait,” I told the usher.
I took Ben into the little room where our Sunday-school class kept its coffee cups. I pulled out a chair, though I wasn’t ready to sit beside him.
He touched the red ribbon.
“Matthew made me promise him something last winter,” he said. “Before you ask me to change, may I tell you what happened?”
What He Said First
The coffee cups were on a shelf above us. Styrofoam, the kind the older ladies wrote their names on in marker so nobody took the wrong one. Matthew had written his name on one as a joke when he was about twelve. Still there. I hadn’t been able to throw it away and I couldn’t look at it now.
Ben sat in the chair I’d pulled out. I stood near the door, holding the program.
“Take your time,” I said, which was not what I meant. We had maybe twenty minutes.
He smoothed the dress across his knees. Plain thing, up close. Cotton, square neckline. The kind you’d buy at a department store for thirty dollars and wear a handful of times. The hem had been let down once and you could still see the old stitch line.
“Last December,” Ben said. “We were closing up the store. Tuesday night, real slow. Matt had been quiet all week and I figured it was just the holidays.”
He stopped.
“He wasn’t quiet because of the holidays.”
The Thing Matthew Had Been Carrying
Ben told it straight. No drama, no buildup. That was always how he talked. Matthew used to say Ben could describe a car crash like he was reading off a grocery list.
Last December, Matthew had told Ben that he’d been keeping something since he was about sixteen. He didn’t have clean language for it, Ben said. Matthew wasn’t somebody who spent time reading articles or looking things up online. He just knew that sometimes, when he was alone, he felt more like himself in a way that was hard to explain. And part of how he felt more like himself involved, among other things, women’s clothes.
Not all the time. Not even often. But enough that it had weight.
He’d bought a few things over the years. Kept them in a box in his closet, under some old car manuals, which I would have gotten to eventually and thought nothing of.
I stood in that room with the styrofoam cups and the construction-paper artwork from the four-year-olds’ Sunday school class and I heard all of it and I did not move.
“He wasn’t sure what it made him,” Ben said. “He told me that a couple of times. He just knew he’d been carrying it alone for a long time. And he was tired.”
Matthew was twenty-four. He’d been carrying something since he was sixteen.
Eight years.
What He Made Ben Swear
The dress was his.
That’s the part that sat in me strange, and still does. Ben hadn’t gone out and bought a red dress to make a statement. The dress had been Matthew’s. He’d had it for two years. Wore it maybe a dozen times, alone in his apartment, making dinner, watching television.
He told Ben last winter that he didn’t know if he’d ever be ready to show that part of himself to his parents. Not as an accusation. Ben was clear about that, said it twice. Not like we’d done something wrong, not like he was angry at us. He just said: I don’t know if I’ll get there.
And then: but if something happens to me before I do, I don’t want to be buried as only half of what I was.
He made Ben promise. You wear this to my funeral. Don’t explain it first. Let them see it.
Ben pulled the ribbon loose from the belt loop and held it out across the table.
“He tied this on himself,” he said. “He said it was so you’d know it was really his.”
I looked at the ribbon.
I knew that ribbon. It was from a spool in my kitchen junk drawer, the one I used every Christmas for packages. Matthew had given it to me years ago as a joke stocking stuffer because I was always running out of ribbon and complaining about it.
There was maybe six inches left on that spool. I’d looked at it just last week searching for batteries.
What Frank Did
I didn’t cry in that room. I want to be honest about that. I stood there holding the ribbon and felt something happening in my chest but I didn’t cry. I think I was too far past the point where crying would have covered it.
I walked back into the church. Frank was standing at the end of the pew where we’d be sitting. He watched me come down the aisle. He’s been reading my face for thirty-one years.
I leaned up and told him quietly what Ben had told me.
Frank stood very still. He’s not a man who processes things fast. I’ve always known this about him. He needs time, and time was what we didn’t have.
He turned and looked at Ben, still standing near the back, holding the ribbon, waiting.
Frank walked back there. I didn’t follow. I watched from the aisle.
He stood in front of Ben for a moment. Then he put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, the way he used to do with Matthew after a bad game, and he said something I couldn’t hear. Ben nodded. Frank nodded.
Frank came back to me.
“He should sit with us,” Frank said.
That was it. We didn’t talk about the rest of it until weeks later, late at night in the kitchen when the casseroles had stopped coming and the house was too quiet. But right then, Frank said: he should sit with us.
Burying Half a Person
The service ran an hour and ten minutes. Pastor Greg spoke. Matthew’s cousin Derek went four minutes over and nobody cared. Someone from the main office had sent flowers, yellow ones, which were Matthew’s least favorite color and which seemed exactly right in a way I couldn’t explain.
Ben sat two seats down from me. He sang the hymns. He knew the words to “It Is Well,” which surprised me. He had a low, flat singing voice, no sense of pitch, the kind that usually embarrasses people into silence.
He didn’t stop singing.
During the second hymn I reached over Frank and put my hand over Ben’s hand for a few seconds and then took it back.
I don’t know if that was the right thing. I’m not sure there was a right thing.
What I know is that I came close to sending him away. I had the words ready. I’d rehearsed them walking down that aisle: Please, I know you mean well, but not today. Come back later. But not today. And Matthew would have been buried as only half of what he was, in a church full of people who loved him, none of them knowing him fully.
That’s the part that keeps me up. Not the dress. Not the ribbon. Not the whisper from behind me when Ben walked in.
The eight years. The box under the car manuals. My son in his apartment in a red cotton dress, alone, careful, not sure he’d ever get to not be alone with it.
What I Found on Tuesday
Four days after the funeral I went to Matthew’s apartment to start going through his things. Frank offered to come. I told him I needed to go alone first.
The box was where Ben said it would be. Shoebox, a nice one, the kind that comes with dress boots. Inside, three or four items folded neat. A cardigan. A pair of soft pants. A green scarf with small gold threads in it.
And a photograph. Phone photo, printed at a drugstore, the edges a little wavy. Matthew alone in his apartment, wearing the green scarf over a plain white shirt, smiling at the camera. He’d taken it himself, arm extended.
He looked relaxed.
I have hundreds of photos of Matthew. Birthday photos, Christmas photos, fishing trips, the graduation shot with the crooked cap and the enormous grin. I know my son’s face in all kinds of light.
I had never seen him look quite like that.
I put the photo in my purse. The rest I left in the box on the shelf, because I wasn’t ready to decide what to do with it and I might not be for a long time.
I sat on Matthew’s floor for probably forty minutes. A neighbor’s dog barked. The refrigerator hummed.
I thought about the styrofoam cup on the shelf at church with his name on it in black marker, the joke gift he’d left somewhere I’d never throw it away, and I thought about a boy who knew his mother well enough to know that much and still couldn’t find the way to tell her the other thing.
I don’t know what to do with all of that.
I’m not sure I’m supposed to, yet.
—
If this stayed with you, pass it to someone who might need it.
For another story about grief and a red dress, read The Young Man in the Red Dress. You may also connect with a son’s unexpected return and a grandson’s surprising act of forgiveness.
