The barber shaved my brother’s beard after the accident

Dear Delyara, My brother had a huge beard. Our mother hated it. He loved that she hated it. After he died in an accident, the funeral home asked whether we wanted him shaved because part of his face needed careful preparation. Mum said yes immediately. I said no. We argued in front of strangers. Mum said she wanted to see her son’s face. I said the beard was his face. Eventually, we called his barber, a man named Youssef who had trimmed it every three weeks for years. He came to the funeral home carrying his own tools. He stood beside my brother for a long time before touching him. Then he said quietly, “He always said never shorter than this.” He trimmed only what was necessary and left the rest. Mum cried when she saw him but did not complain. I had never understood the intimacy of a barber knowing how a man wanted his own face to exist in the world. At the funeral, people kept saying my brother looked like himself. That happened because one man remembered an instruction my brother had repeated casually while alive and respected it after he could no longer argue.