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A Toast to Nothing (Part 3)
By Thomas Miller
Years later, I found myself back in the city where Richard had died. A book signing, a conference, something that brought me through familiar streets and past the place he once lived. I hadn’t planned to visit his grave, but something compelled me to.
I drove to the cemetery, an old, unkempt place on the outskirts of town where the county buried the unwanted, the unclaimed, the forgotten. No manicured lawns, no statues of angels—just rows of plain markers, weather-worn and nameless.
I had to ask the caretaker where he was buried.
“Lot 42,” the man said, glancing at a clipboard. “No marker. Just a plot in the ground.”
No marker.
No name.
Just a plot in the ground.
I stood there for a long time, staring at the dirt. There was no sign that Richard had ever been there. No flowers. No offerings. No proof that a life had ended here.
I thought of the boy he used to be—the brother I once knew.
How he used to talk about changing the world. How he used to dream.
I wondered: When did the bitterness start? Was it one bad year? One lost job? Or had the resentment always been in him, just waiting to fester?
I pulled a flask from my coat, the irony not lost on me.
“To you, Richard,” I muttered, taking a sip. The whiskey burned on the way down. “You always said the world was against you. Maybe you were right. Or maybe you just let it win.”
I poured the rest of the whiskey onto the dirt.
A funeral toast for a man no one remembered.
A part of me wanted to believe that, even in death, he could hear me. But Richard never believed in anything beyond the grave. He always scoffed at faith, at redemption, at the idea that there was anything waiting for us in the end.
So maybe there was nothing left of him.
Just bones, rotting in the dirt.
I stood there a moment longer, then turned and walked away.
Richard was gone.
And so was any reason to keep looking back.