When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with slanted eyebrows and stiff, silent upper lips. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we’d never really had to do the holding before and, as far as we knew, this is how men mourn.

We dusted antique left-behinds with delicate, moth-wing hands that fluttered here and there and never stopped trembling -- dead giveaways that within the corridors of our arms our heartbeats went stampeding, arrhythmic. We couldn’t quite bend them into the proper shape for prayer, so instead we ran them, with touch somewhere between float and feel, along every ashtray and age-stained picture album. In that moment I think we each wished that memory read like braille, but no one ever said as much. Because this is how men mourn.

We honored our patriarch with whiskey, hidden away for what must have been twice my age, between the carved out pages of old stacked books.
We drank like secrets. His portrait played witness.

We promised between our teeth with tinged lips tight, keeping words in that might otherwise crumble us like great ancient empires.

We singed and smoldered in a burn that coated our throats, quelling a choke that kept climbing its way up from a chest that never quite stayed sunk. Boys grow up loving the clinking twist of unlocking deadbolts but men peek through keyholes. Because this is how men mourn. Silent and straight with head only slightly slanted.

But when my father betrayed his rigidity with words that clicked clean like unfastening locks, we traded this stale air in for wind laced with the electric taste of thunderstorms. We forgot how men mourn.

When my grandfather passed away, my brothers and I held my dad with lightning behind bleared eyes. Because we are young and foolish and still learning. Because we have umpteen days left to dress in bittersweet vestiges and, as far as we know, this is how men live on.