My Widowed Father Married a Woman 36 Years Younger Than Him — At His Funeral, She Finally Got What She Deserved
My name is Sybil and I was thirty-four when my father remarried, eight months after my mother's funeral, to a woman seven years younger than me.
Seraphine was forty-two when he died. He was seventy-eight.
Thirty-six years.
I did the arithmetic out loud at my brother's kitchen table in December of 2018, three days after they signed the papers at the courthouse, and I said the number in a way that I would like to have back.
Her name was Seraphine and everybody called her Sera and I never did, not once in six and a half years. I called her Seraphine, fully, every single time, and I want to be honest that this was on purpose.
I tried. I want that on the record even though the record is not going to be kind to me.
I sent a Christmas card. I invited them to my son's confirmation. I said "of course" when my father asked if she could come.
My brother Lucan did not try at all. He called her what he thought she was, out loud, every time she left a room, for six years, in front of his children.
Here is what we watched between December of 2018 and June of this year.
We watched her redecorate the house on Alder Street from top to bottom. The house we grew up in. The kitchen my mother chose in 1996, gone in a weekend. The wallpaper in the hall, gone. My mother's curtains, gone.
We watched her convince our father to sell the lake house at Vireo Lake in 2021.
He built that place. Not "had it built." He and my grandfather framed it in 1979 and he finished the interior himself over eleven summers and there is a beam in it with all four of our heights pencilled on it going up to 2004.
It sold in September of 2021 for four hundred and ten thousand dollars and I did not speak to my father for two months.
And we watched her sit beside his hospital bed in designer sunglasses, indoors, scrolling on her phone, while I held his other hand and Lucan paced the corridor outside because he couldn't be in the room with her.
He died on a Tuesday morning, the third of June, at about six-forty. Quietly. Before either of us got there.
She was there. We were not.
Seraphine planned the funeral herself.
"Exactly the way he would have wanted," she told my aunt on the phone, and my aunt repeated it to me in a tone that carried a great deal.
And not one of us recognized a single choice she made.
The flowers were white stock and eucalyptus. My father liked marigolds. He grew marigolds along the whole south fence for thirty years.
The music was a cello piece I had never heard in my life. My father listened to two things: brass bands and a specific country station out of Winsley.
And the photo on the program was not one any of us would have picked. It was him at maybe fifty, outdoors, squinting, in a coat I didn't recognize, half-turned away from the camera.
We had four hundred photographs of that man. She chose one where you could barely see his face.
The service was at eleven o'clock on Saturday the seventh of June, at Ozel and Sons.
There were about two hundred people. He was a well-liked man in a small town for a long time.
