Everything was organized. She told me about how she had planned the funeral three days after he died, highlighting the order and simple complexities of the event. She listed the linens, chairs, coffin, everything. She had it all down perfectly because that's what he always needed right? Perfection. That's not how she said it exactly. She said, “How could I not give something back to honor him? He's given so much to me and my mom. I just want it to be just right for him.” Even as she said it, she knew it could never be.

Estee had always been very close to her father. She would brag to me during recess and at after school playdates about how many countries he’d been to and how many gifts he’d brought her back. Her dad loved running, so she joined the track team and gained a scholarship to UVA because of it. Her dad hated social media, so she made a big show of only having it because “it's basically mandated at this point”. Her dad only loved her mom when her mom gave up everything for him, so Estee followed her lead but silently promised herself to run faster, try harder, and exceed more than her mother could have ever imagined.

She told me about the heart attack three days after it happened. She said she wanted to tell me earlier but she just couldn’t. I understood. She let out a breath after that and her tightly knitted eyebrows started to relax. She interlocked her steadily defrosting fingers, frigid from walking back from her moms house in October wind. 

“We finally finished everything today.” She started, “The funeral is completely planned, everything is bought. Not that there was much to do. He already planned most of it for us. I guess he just didn't want us to ruin anything special for him again.” She laughed faintly.

I remember when she had tried to plan his 50th birthday party. Her idea was perfectly catered to her dad’s interests. The day would start with a 8 am hike that led down to a clearing where the rest of his friends and family were waiting and  they would have a cookout. It was brilliant. She even put stops along the way that he was guaranteed to love. The day before, her family had a small celebration where they gave him some gifts. Estee’s mom called me family, but her husband wouldn’t so I wasn't invited to these types of things. There was never room for anything less than perfection to sneak in. 

Estee’s mom gave him a book on the complete history of the Falkland Islands war (a subject he was strongly interested in to the point that if you were left in a room alone with him for long enough he would always end up talking about it) and a pretty high quality leather wallet. Estee’s gift was better. She gave him custom hiking boots that would not only soothe the long lasting ache of an accident with a badly made IKEA bookshelf, but would be the perfect hint for the plans the next day. 

“Wow” he proclaimed when he had undone the tightly tied ribbon, “This is incredible, thank you.” He looked up to a beaming Estee with a photogenic grin.

The next day, 5 minutes after her parents were supposed to get there, Estee had started to sweat. Her father wasn’t there. He hadn't even sent a text to tell her that he had left the house, which he never did but in that moment, she really wished that he would start. 

“Hey are you guys almost here?” She asked after dialing her dad’s number.

“Oh darling, I’m sorry. We can’t make it today” He started, “You see the hiking boots were a couple of sizes too big and my old ones are too beat up to wear anymore. At least we got to celebrate yesterday.”

Estee stood there silent, barely hearing the beep that meant the phone call was over. She knew that she needed to call everyone, tell them that it was over but instead she sunk to the ground unable to do anything but stare at the birds fluttering the trees to find each other again and again. 

The morning of the funeral met me with a chilling silence. Even before we moved in together I had always been so used to the whirrs and hums of Estee’s impossibly early morning routine. Even in elementary school, she would wake up hours before I did. Yet today, she laid beside me, motionless and peaceful, looking smaller than I have ever seen her. I let her sleep and snuck out of our room to make coffee. That was soon disrupted by a loud “Sh*t!” coming from our room and a disgruntled Estee following it.

“Riley, why didn’t you wake me up? You know how important today is!” She grumbled to me, snatching the coffee mug from my hands. “You know how much I have to do today. What time is it?

“9:30”

“Oh my god.”

“Listen, I know today is going to be really hard. I just wanted you to get a bit of extra sleep because I remember how exhausting it is from my mom's funeral. Okay?” I said hopefully. This did not please the resentful Estee in front of me, draining my previously full coffee mug in front of her. 

“Come on.” I said, bringing her into a hug and I felt her start to detense..

“What if the eulogy isn't good enough. I just want it to be perfect.” she whispered to me. I pulled her closer to me.

I know how much little things like that feel like herculean tasks when you're drowning in something as intangible as grief. I know how it feels to be surrounded by it, to gasp helplessly as it fills your senses and leaves you as a hollow version of the person you were before. I knew that Estee would fight it and win. Whenever she falls into something like that she always gets back up ten times as strong. 

I would never say this out loud, let alone to Estee, but I hate her dad. He always seemed so effortless with how he manipulated her: closing her out just to bring her back in as long as she got better at whatever wasn’t good enough for him. I hated the way he held her like water in his hands. The way that he convinced her that one mistake would ruin her life like a drop of black spreading through tissue paper. He did this with her mom too. She would clamber to please him. When I first met Estee she had already seemed to accept the way they were together. She told me that her mom stopped going to college so that she could raise her. As we grew older we started to understand what that really meant. We saw it everywhere, with how her mother was the one to wake her up, pack her lunch, drop and pick her up from school, and make dinner in an unending domestic loop. Her father, on the other hand, had a job from one of his college friends that had a dad rich enough to start a company, a BMW that started as a future gift for Estee, then became a family car, and finally you had to ask for his permission to borrow his keys, and constantly bragged about balancing work and still managing to raise a family. Estee always seemed unbothered by the way that he ruled over them. To be fair, what else could she let herself believe? She was stuck with them everyday for the first 18 years of her life. The options were: not accept the way her father treated her and her mother, and allow him to make her feel horrible for the rest of her life or ignore the way her father treated her mother and endlessly try to meet his expectations but, get the energizing jolt of approval every couple of months. Obviously, she picked the second option.

The funeral itself was indistinguishable from every other funeral you've ever been to. Estee had worked endlessly to get everything right in order for it to be forgettable. I sat on her left clutching her hand the entire time and her mother on her right, sitting farther than a mother and her daughter should on this day. In a way, this distance has always been a sort of habit for them. When her dad would go on business trips for his trust fund baby bullsh*t job the two of them were left alone, but his dark cloud still loomed over them. So they stayed the way they always were together. Estee would get up 15 minutes before her mom did and go on a 10 mile run. Her mother would start the day by stretching and thinking about how if she had time, she would go on a run too. When Estee got back, she would tell her mom she wasn't hungry. This habit had earned her applause from her dad and she wasn’t going to let go of it just because he was gone temporarily. Then she would go to school and her mother would eat her breakfast when no one could find out. Then she would clean, run errands, and pick Estee up from track practice. Her mother made a point to keep up the tradition of family dinners. Estee told me that she thought this practice was ridiculous. They rarely spoke during these dinners and even when they did it was never about anything important.

Estee let go of my hand and gathered herself and her cards detailing the speech she had slaved over. She whispered excuse me to the people in our aisle as she pushed towards the front of the room. She marched towards the podium and positioned herself in a way that radiated confidence. She looked down at her note cards and looked up again, preparing to give the speech that would celebrate his legacy as the perfect father, but when she tried to speak, her voice caught and no sound came out. Instead, she froze. Her confidence waned as her eyes darted to the carefully chosen casket. She stood there silent, suddenly forgetting how she performed for him all of those years, withering as she felt the weight of his disapproval on her once again. 

Her eyes found her mother, whose tired face held a forgiving smile.