The funeral director asked it kindly, the way you'd ask someone to spell their last name: Who would you like as pallbearers?
We needed six. My brother, my husband, my father's brother. Then my mother and I looked at each other across the table.
My father was not an unfriendly man. He coached Little League for twelve years. He waved at everyone on our street. He went to his coworkers' retirement parties and stayed until the end. But when we tried to name three more men who had actually been his friends, men who'd sat with him, called him, known what he was afraid of, we couldn't.
In the end the funeral home provided two staff members. A neighbor volunteered to be the sixth. He told me afterward that he and my father had talked over the fence for twenty years and he never once had his phone number.
I don't think my father was lonely in a way he would have admitted. I think he was surrounded by people and still alone, and I think he'd decided that was just what being a man meant.
I've been watching my husband since. I've started asking him the funeral director's question, gently, in my head. Who would carry you?
Last month he started a Sunday-morning walk with two guys from his old job. I haven't told him why I cried when he mentioned it.