But her lips were all wrong. They were stiff and flat — not like the lips that would part to take up half her face in a mischievous smile. These were not the lips that told me jokes and secrets and dreams.

This was a stranger. This was not my best friend.

I wanted her back.

But part of me wanted to join her.

As much as it hurt to listen to the pastor speak about Devon’s death, I sat loathing the moment when she would finish, and I would walk out and never see my friend again. As I filed past her casket one last time, I wanted to scream out loud. I wanted to crawl up next to Devon and hold her and will her back to life. I wanted to tell her she couldn’t leave me because it just hurt too much.

But I couldn’t do that. So I just touched her hand and cried.

Life in the hive puckered up my night / The kiss of death, the embrace of life.

The difference between grieving for Devon and my father is that Devon comforts me with all of the good memories we made together. I think about the gossiping, the laughing and, oh God, the mint green eye shadow. Yes, we were not exempt from those first tragic experiments with makeup. I have the photos to prove it. Devon and I are lying on my bed smiling the cheesiest grins, with a pound of Wet ‘n’ Wild cosmetics between us, for all posterity to cringe at.

Those are precious photographs.

I hope there is a heaven for Devon to enjoy. And I hope she is up there quaffing margaritas as the finest freshly waxed male angels lie at her feet — the ones with the BIG wings.

Back here on this little planet, I clutch these photographs and cry. I think of these memories, and I become so sad. But at the same time, I am so thankful I was blessed to have her in my life at all. Every second I spent with this amazing woman was a blessing.

For my father, grieving is much different. In the days after his death, my mother and I were showered with goodwill. There were many loving meals, many bouquets and many cards. I hated getting cards. They never said the right thing: “Though you are sad your loved one cannot be with you now, may you be comforted with all of the pleasant memories you shared...”
Hallmark obviously never met Ronald Roof. Thinking of our past only brought me pain.

My father drank himself to death. As I grew up, I watched him push everything out of his life but his addiction. He lost his job, his wife, and, to much extent, his only child to make room for his one true love: alcohol.
When I think about his death, I am pulled to opposite poles. I am as sad he is dead as I am happy he can never hurt me again.

Most days, when we still lived together, I could hold my breath from the time he walked through the door from work to when I heard the crack of his beer can opening.

Weekends were the worst. He would start drinking as soon as he woke up, sometimes as early as 8 a.m. First beer, then whiskey, then he would yell at my mother and me in an alcoholic rage all evening.

He rejected me. He sat as a lump on the couch through my life. He rarely raised his sight to me, except to verbally sting me. Certainly not to say, “I love you.”

He was far from an ideal father. Yet, even as he was in and out of the hospital for alcoholism-related illnesses, I never left him. When he would call me, fear stunning his voice after vomiting blood, I would rush in to see him. He would say he was going to commit suicide, and I would talk with him for hours, desperately searching for the words that would keep him alive.

“Dad, don’t you love me enough to stay alive?” I would ask him.

“No,” he would reply, shaking his head vacantly.

After he died, these dusty nightmares rained on me. All of the bad memories I trained myself to forget now haunted me. And all the pain that as a little girl would keep me awake at night praying was suddenly so real again. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.

I felt dead, just like him. The only reason I knew I was still alive was because the pain was so strong it immobilized me. Some days it took hours just to get out of bed.

As the child of an alcoholic, I learned quickly how to be self-sufficient. I learned not to trust in or need anyone. But after my father died, I realized I could not heal myself. I spent my entire life trying to ignore the pain of my father’s systematic breakdown of my emotions. I spent so long trying to survive day-to-day life with him that I had no time to fix myself. I didn’t know how.

I decided to see a therapist to teach me how to rebuild my life. The first time we met, I felt like I was on an examining table. It felt like she held me down with pins and needles and shined a bright light on me, like the doctors did the day I was born. I came out with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. They thought I was going to die. Funny — I didn’t feel that way until right now.

Then the Cadillac / it puttered back into the graveyard. And me / I got out again.