The world doesn’t bother to mourn
with us today. On our ride to the
funeral home the sun is not hiding, the skies are not shrouded with clouds, and the birds have not hushed their songs.
We reach the destination and
step down from the vehicle. As if to nail
the hammer in the coffin, we all wear matching black attire. I walk inside, black heels sounding on the
fresh pavement. Click, click, click,
like the second hand of a clock.
Once inside, I turn my attention to
the funeral home directors. They present
their practiced faces of perfectly mixed comfort and sadness to first one, then
another family member.
Tears are shed during the service, and
for good reason. Sometimes we know we’ll
see them again – their lives revealed where their home was. But this man is truly lost to us. Hopeless is a terrible word.
One after another person gets up to
face the black garbed crowd and speak a few tearful words. “a good man…” was heard at least a dozen
times, accompanied by such key words as “family” and “legacy.”
But what lies beneath the black
ties, and the heels, and the tear stained faces?
Truth. We all know who he was,
who he was really. So when the man with
the worn book said that “We are gathered here today to remember…” what he
really could have said was that we were gathered here to begin to forget. This would be day one of replacing our real
memories with the beauty of retrospect.
I like all of this considerably. The last graf in particular is both potent and punishing--potent in its rhetoric and punishing (in the sense of hard and demanding) in its message--that is, no one can read it and NOT measure one's own place in the universe.
ReplyDeleteI also appreciated in graf 1 the fact that Nature was utterly indifferent to another death. The whole first paragraph is quite poetic, in fact.
Keep writing, Danielle! Semester is over one month from today.
Do you read Emily Dickinson? Her poetry is compressed, religious, mystical, and only apparently simple.
ReplyDeleteYes, I read a lot of Dickinson - she was very good. I blame her for my bad habit of hyphens.
ReplyDeleteI'm addicted to dashes--not sure I can blame that on the Belle of Amherst though. I will use them in preference to respectable punctuation like semicolons, parentheses, ellipsis, whenever I think I can get away with it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I'm not the only one! Sometimes they simply seem to have a better flow.
ReplyDelete