Page 8

Loss

Dead.
He is dead.
That word is so final. It deceives the wide belief that this life is not all there is.
It is an ending word. Like the sound of a large book closing with force.
It stops.
It is a black word. It is a pale word. It's shadow is a pale darkness with sharp, distinct lines.
It is the polar opposite of imagination and creation and enlightenment. It is... inanimate.
It sits on her tongue like something cement and unmovable. It cannot be taken back or moved somewhere I can't see it.

Dead.
Not dying. Already dead. And I wasn't there.
I wasn't there to stop it.
I drove him away. And he died.

Page 9

No amount of screaming, no amount of denying will make that word stop being what it is. I cannot change that word. That word is permanent. It is final. And it is always eventual.

And yet...
It still feels so unreal. Cruel farce. A bad joke.
A mistake someone made somewhere, a misprint.
I see him lying there in a casket of the wrong color. (he would have wanted hunter green and it's a dull gray. Dead gray.) I still cannot accept it. 
I keep expecting him to sit up suddenly and shout at the congregation. Laugh his booming laugh and have a good long joke of it.
Mother bids me feel his cheeks. She says it feels as if he just came in from the cold. I can't do that. It would seal this reality into something too substantial for me to bear at this moment.

My grandmother is crying.
I have only seen her cry once before. I cannot imagine what it must be like to bury your own child.


Years before today, my father told me about a very vivid dream he had. He dreamt he was watching his own funeral from the sky. He said it was weird seeing all the people he had touched throughout life, come to pay their last respects. He had dreamt he was outside, in a cemetery. That was when he told me his final wishes. He really wanted to be cremated, and his ashes scattered in his favorite lake. Diamond Lake. 

Diamond is such a more lively word than dead.
It softens its current context a little.




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