The first time Cole hears Pastor Wyatt say this he remembers how his mother hated when people said passed, or passed away. He’d come home from school one day and repeated the teacher’s announcement: Ruthie Lind was absent that day because her grandmother had passed. “Died. Say died, pumpkin,” his mother said. “Passed sounds so silly.” She had called him pumpkin and she did not seem to be angry with him, but he had felt obscurely ashamed. Later he was told that people were afraid to say died because they were afraid of dying. Passed was just a euphemism. The funny-sounding word was new to Cole and for a time it kept recurring, floating into his head for no apparent reason. But the first time he saw the word in a book he did not recognize it, he was so sure it began with a u. Followed by an f, of course. Pastor Wyatt does not always say passed. More often he says went home. (“Had a great-aunt went home at a hundred and three.”) It all depends on whether the person he is talking about was saved or unsaved.
