by myownsatellite » 5/18/2006, 7:23 pm
I wanted feedback on this one.
Anyone up for it?
Salt
How often do our parents weep while we children are not watching? Our little eyes and ears are buried in pillows or electronic entertainment while soft puddles drip themselves onto faces, clothes, blankets. I am twenty years old now. Not once have my growing eyes ever seen my father cry.
It is always hard to say goodbye to a close friend, someone you have grown with, loved with, vacationed with, held while she cried. A beautiful service and many others to share grief with do not make the loss any easier to carry.
A white shroud had been draped over the white and pink casket, a cross stitched in separate fabric covering the length and breadth of the shroud. It sat in front of the altar, in the middle of the church. I felt unable to contain tears or heartbreak as I stared at the lack of her. Spilling my sorrow was inevitable, but I was determined to keep it in. She would tell me to shut the hell up.
We were singing. Well, that’s not exactly true. I wasn’t singing. My parents weren’t singing. I looked around and saw many other people weren’t singing with us. The family was following the example of the choir, singing their grief and hope for her soul.
I didn’t know the words.
The silence of the hymn was broken by short bursts of people sucking in air. The space between we mourners was taken up by the holding-in of sorrow, loud sobs that no one wanted to release for fear of breaking the peaceful torment we were all feeling.
To my left, my tan overcoat father sniffed lightly. I did not look over at him; I wanted to give him that much privacy in his vulnerability. It is something he never gave me, but something he deserved right at that moment. Instead, I felt a deeper ache in my breast. It was the feeling one gets when seeing a sanctified glimpse of a parent's most private emotion. I felt like a child peering through a crack in an accidentally open door, not sure whether to enter and break the moment, or turn her back and close the door to her own room.
As a little girl, when I would yell at my mother and call her names and stomp my way to my room, slamming the door behind me, I would come out moments later to see her door almost shut. I would press my ear to the floor where the wood never quite touched the carpet, and listen. Just the simple sound of a breath among a waterfall was enough to set me to it myself, and I would tip-toe on tiny feet back to my own room, shut the door, and soak my stuffed bunny rabbit I never named with my regret.
Except this time I could not leave the pew I was glued to, could not leave the side of my now sniveling father. I watched out of the corner of my left eye as he reached up a hand and swiped in futility at his own left eye. My mother had not given him a tissue.
I could feel that wet release of composure as the tears fell first from my right eye and then my left, and I reached over to touch, hold, love my father. His giant hand closed around my not-so-giant fingers, squeezing gently. I tried so hard not to sniffle, not to let him see me crying -- What are you crying for? I was imagining he'd say -- but he was now sniffling and crying himself. My mother was on the other side of me, face red, eyes bleeding tears.
When I felt the connection of grief between my parents and myself, the rest of the church disappeared. I was no longer listening to the incantations and intonations of the priests who were praying for the soul of my dear departed. Nothing existed outside the three of us and the coffin, holding each other, and in holding, comforting.
An eon later, we were in the car. Hands had been shaken, our love had been given, and it was time to put flowers on the casket and say goodbye. I climbed in the back seat as my parents climbed in the front, my mother still teary-eyed and my father not quite sucking in tears and snot. He sighed as he shut his door, That was a hard one. All I could do was nod. Twenty years have passed without this child seeing her daddy cry; she wished it would never happen again.
How often as children are we exposed to death? How much more often as adults. We lose close friends, acquaintances, people we barely know. When I lost someone special, someone loved, I watched my father cry. Things are different now. There is no more smile, no more purple hair, no more loud laughter.
Darkness breeds silence and inside that coffin there was a whole hell of a lot of darkness. She has been silenced, and through her silence comes the noise of tears, of sobbing, of my father sniffling quietly to himself. He hopes no one notices.
But I do.
~*Megan*~
"Wow, nice to meet you. Nine years huh? That's a really long time. Are you going to stab me or something? Because if you are, can we get it over with?" ~Jer
You are never stronger than when you land on the other side of despair. ~Zadie Smith, White Teeth