Loss has many windows.
Parents, pets, and aunts all endings give a different
perspective.
The first death, the first funeral we attend lingers, a vaporous
cloud that floats a mind movie memory the shades future loss.
My first loss was that of an eight-year-old girl cousin who
was my same age. She was buried in her first communion dress. She had a veil on her head and an amused
smile to her sealed lips.
The kids all played hide and go seek in the funeral home.
Our rambunctious natures not restrained by death. Her parents more comforted by
laughter than tears.
At the wake we put on a musical review. Our Irish ancestry fusing through our young
souls as we sang and the old ones clapped resoundingly, grief’s’ dirge was somehow
melodious.
You think after many
funerals you would have an expert status, sort of like a skill set you could
post on LinkedIn.
But it is never the same. Grief’s Rolodex may reveal unshed
tears when one hears a church hymn, but it is like a famous song covered by a
different performer. Familiar, but it is it’s own.
The view is markedly altered when we loose one of our own. I
had no reference point when brothers ex wife died. In the heart there are no
exes. Chapters lived back in time when all were young is what stays in the
heart at a funeral.
She had a name that announced her preciousness, Julie.
She had dimples and tawny untamed curls. She was a woman who
liked the earth, who asked for little and asked for little.
But she had asked for a degree and a house and against the fierce
current of life she created these. She found a little ramshackle house and made
it a home, for her son and daughter. She made pots of soup and memories. She brought
them smiles until their dimples matched hers.
One’s life narrative alters at death; the golden threads
weave with the dark times until the fabric becomes a gilded tapestry.
There was much that could have encumbered her, life events
that were soul scars. Familial addiction that left a cloud on her young life, a
mom who died too soon, leaving her no place to burrow for love, the ex spouse
who lived in the woods and liked to take the children on walk abouts, money
only enough for needs.
But she was fierce, and not a complainer.
She forged on.
Until the work truck slipped into reverse and shattered her
beneath it. An assault so traumatic that it is likely her deceased mom called
to her from the other realm. She did not heed that call. Instead she heeded the
voice of her own heart. She defied death, stayed to live more moment’s, to walk
with her children a little closer to being grown ups than her own mother had
managed.
Twelve years later she died, still too young at fifty-two.
When people survive deaths first knocking they seek the purpose
of their survival. Why did I live? What shall God have me do?
Living twelve more years, too short, yet for what purpose?
Julie’s memorial was
held at the church next door, the one whose resounding praising and
hallelujah’s had been her Sunday soundtrack while she lolled in bed after a
long workweek. After the service we all went next door to gather with her
children at her home.
It was not the staged sanitized environment of a funeral
home. In the home of the deceased we could peek into her world, ponder her last
moments. It was a montage of her life and memorial to her journey. The ivory
Victorian wedding dress that hung on her bedroom wall to swayed, her dreams in
the fabric.
A golden hue came from the small room with wrap around
windows. It seemed a sacristy developed for meditation. The only item in the
room was a gong used by Tibetans in their call to prayer. The paned windows
seemed miniature frames to the splendor of the garden. It was a fantasy garden,
a mystical place lifted from a dreamy celluloid fairy tale. Perhaps the bloom-covered
trellises were fairy habitats.
Her son had labored on this garden after her accident. He
cut stone, moved earth and constructed arbors. He wanted his mom to have a
paradise, he gave heaven on earth.
Paradise right there in her own yard, his callouses from
labors to create a beauty to enchant his mother to tarry in life.
Now she has departed to another garden. He had given her
vision of the holy landscape in all the beauty he created. She was fearless,
undaunted in life. He perhaps emboldened her to seek a paradise more lovely
than floating frocks and lush earthly landscapes. From the earth she came to
return and he was the souls tiller easing her on.
