the mood, as only Devi could. He made food, brought Julian tiger water, told Julian things. They sat down with Ava; they broke their bread; they had sake and egg rolls with twice-cooked pork dunked in chili soy sauce; they sipped Ga tan, a Vietnamese chicken soup. And then Devi talked.
“My own son was raised a Catholic, too,” Devi said. “But by the time he was grown, barely a trace of any teaching remained inside him. A remnant of faith turned out to be nothing but empty space.”
“It’s not just your son,” Julian said. “That’s how I lived most of my adult life. I had a fairly religious upbringing, which I attempted to discard when I went to college. My father’s family were loud devout Catholics, but my mother was a silent Lutheran Norwegian. Except for my near-constant search for answers to life’s unsolvable riddles, I felt more akin to her than I did to my Dia de los Muertos relatives. I went to a secular school with other kids who felt the way I did. Any mention of church was met with an eye roll. We talked video games, football, boxing, music, movies, girls. God never entered our language except in blasphemy. Until I met Ashton. He didn’t go to church, but he had faith.”
Devi nodded. “That was my son, too,” he said. “A typical boy, growing up in London, not listening to his dad. He wanted to be a photographer. I thought it was frivolous. He thought I was hopelessly old-fashioned. He was embarrassed by me. After his mother died, all he did was party.”
Julian nodded. Ashton, too, except for the dad part. Dad left the family, found a new life back in England, and didn’t return for his son, not even after the mother died. Ashton shuttled between a dozen foster homes until UCLA.
“Then as now, it’s difficult to tell by a man’s life and actions whether or not he is a believer,” Devi said. “Religious thought and teachings are so disconnected from daily life. A man can go one week, then another, and soon through his whole existence and not encounter God in his dealings with himself or other people.”
“Maybe when new life is created?” Ava said.
“Despite the requisite exclamations of Oh my God, often not even then,” Devi said. “The only time man usually comes into contact with faith or his lack thereof is when life ends.”
Julian lowered his head.
“You can conceive without God,” said Devi, “you can give birth, marry, live every Sunday, every Good Friday, every day without God, but it’s difficult to confront death without God—especially for the living. We don’t know what the dead do when the door closes, and darkness or light swallows them. But we know what we the living do when tasked with the burden of their burial, ritual, funeral, memorial. We have a hard time with it. A man dies quietly in the hospital. Sometimes his family is present, sometimes not. A priest is often absent, for the man has no priest and has never been to church, at least not willingly. After some medical to and fro, the body gets taken away. The funeral director brings it to a place most people rarely enter. There it lies for a few hours or days or weeks until the family decides whether to bury or cremate. Cremation is now the most popular option, for it allows the body to return to dust without any theological fanfare. I once knew a man who had made his own funeral arrangements, planned for his own disposal. He died alone in Dover, and by the time his sons arrived, a few days later, his body had already been cremated.”
“How do you know?”
“I went to Dover and sat with him before he died,” Devi said. “His sons didn’t know me at all. They were presented with a cardboard box filled with their father’s ashes and another cardboard box that held the last of his earthly belongings. His drugstore-bought reading glasses. His disposable cell phone. The Timex watch he had since the ’70s. His thirty-year-old wallet, in which there was a ten-pound note, a National Health card, a credit card, one nearly expired license, and an old magazine about eagles. That was all. The sons kept the ashes and threw the other box into the trash on their way out. There was no funeral, no memorial, no wake, no dinner. Perhaps they went to the pub for a drink, I don’t know. There weren’t