The news was bad.
Devastating.
The kind where when you hear it, you can’t believe it - so
you ask to have the message repeated. Hoping and praying that you heard it
wrong the first time.
So, once again I gather with my friends and family to bury a
loved one.
Tears are shed. Wobbly voices sing the old hymns. We, as
one, traipse through the cemetery in our finery to the pathetically tiny hole
dug into the ground. I would have appreciated the beauty and simplicity of the
country church setting but I was unable to appreciate anything at that moment.
How can I see the beauty in the moment when all I see is
black?
I wanted to scream.
The quiet sobbing of her son broke my heart. The not so
quiet howling of her cousin shattered me.
It wasn’t until much later that you hear more than you want.
As liquor loosened the tongues, whispers in the dark about
what happened came out.
I couldn’t escape the tales.
All of them ugly.
The ebb and flow of the night were obvious. Lots of laughter
and raucous behavior ensued, if only to drown out the quiet that lurked on the
edges of the night.
Once there was a lull, the stories would begin again.
Whispered in my ears.
She wasn’t the girl I once knew.
We had been so close for so long.
I had a picture of us, holding our babies with the future
bright in our eyes.
Plans were made for an arranged marriage between our kids.
It would have been perfect.
I hugged her daughter good-bye with promises that we would
see her again.
She wants to hear the stories behind all the pictures she
has of her mother and me. The ones before all the bad happened.
As I drifted into the shadows, I caught her bright blue eyes
glassy with unshed tears watch me fade away. She wants answers.
Ones I do not have.
ps ~
