The rain started just before they lowered Thomas’s casket, which felt like something he would have found mildly inconvenient and faintly funny. He was that kind of man.

If the roof leaked, he put a bucket under it and called it a “temporary indoor water feature.” Standing there in black shoes sinking into wet cemetery grass, I kept thinking grief had no business sharing space with the memory of his terrible jokes. Except somehow it did.

The rain started just before they lowered Thomas’s casket.