Page 243 - James Caan - The Real Deal

23 · The End of an Era

– but I was consoled by the fact that I thought I had been a dutiful
son. I didn’t feel guilty that I hadn’t been there for him. I didn’t
feel that I had let him down. I hadn’t been there when he had died,
but I had done everything else I could for him. I wonder if the hurt
I caused when I left home at sixteen was actually the foundation
of these feelings. My father and I had re-established a relationship
as adults, and although I always felt a duty towards him my
respect for him was genuine. We had rebuilt our relationship when
we could both have walked away. The fact that we hadn’t done
that, and that we had become close again, told me that he had felt
the same way about me as I had felt about him.
After the service my brothers and I had to carry his coffin to the
hearse, and when we reached the graveyard we had to lower his
coffin into the ground. If bathing him had been traumatic, putting
him in the ground was awful. We then had to fill the grave, and
every time I had to drop another shovelful of earth on to his coffin
I froze. He had only been dead a few hours; yesterday he had been
alive, if not well, and here we were now, covering his coffin with
earth, carrying on until the coffin was obscured, and then piling
on the earth until the burial was complete. It was physically and
emotionally exhausting.
It was quite the worst day of my life, but a few days afterwards
I was surprised to realise that I felt oddly OK about his passing. It
seemed that the rituals had forced so much grief out of me that I
sensed I was through the worst of it. In Islam, it is traditional to
mourn for forty days, and this is what the rest of my family did,
but I was starting to feel that I could almost go back to work. The
family thought there was something wrong with me and that I
must be in shock or denial, but all the memories I had of my father
were good ones, and when I looked back I suppose I was at peace
with how I had behaved towards him. I had done what a son ought
to have done; I had even enabled him to help his children start
businesses of their own. I realised that the rituals and traditions of

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