Religious rituals and summer Sunday attendance

Two days after my mother died, at half past five in the morning, I heard a strange noise outside my bedroom window, the window of the spare bedroom in my parent’s house. It was a rasping, grinding, rolling, grunting, sighing sound, and it kept repeating over and over. I got up and looked out. My father was in the yard, rolling paving slabs to the wheelbarrow, hefting them in, and transporting them around to the back of the house to build the patio he was in the middle of making when my mother died.

This was half past five in the morning, and I had flown in the night before; it was still midnight-thirty east coast time, but what was I to do? I got up, got dressed, and joined the crazy man with the paving slabs and the wheelbarrow while the sun slowly rose.

A week later – these…