Flowers in my hands. . .

I remember a funeral. My great-grandfather’s when I was ten, maybe eleven years old. I close my eyes and all I can see in my mind is the vibrant, almost violent burst of flowers. They bloom in the small church’s sanctuary which groans in agony as its simple white walls are filled mercilessly with those paying their respects. They come to pay their dues. They are obligated to weep so that in time someone will come and weep for them, turning the soil over, returning dust to dust and dirt to dirt.

I don’t mean to invoke cynicism or sarcasm. It’s just that’s purely how it is. The mind is driven by utterly human impulses, one of them the simple fear of death. This fear becomes a great web of heart-breaking gravity that catches us all and forces us to come stare at the dead. It forces us to break our backs and submit ourselves, unwillingly, to the bleak, stoic certain unknown that is blocked by a veil of superstition and faith. Only with our own passing will that veil be dropped, revealing the hidden secrets of the universe.

And so they come unwillingly. No one wants to confront death.

Even there as a child, I could tell the difference between those truthfully mourning and those only pretending to mourn because it was expected. They may have wanted to shout and laugh, be outside in the sunlight but their inexplicable reverence kept them silent. Their fear of death snipped their tongues from saying what they truly felt. They sat poised, hanging on every word of the eulogy, trying to do something to compensate for their apathy. As a child I was one of them, and only now as an adult can I say what I truly felt that day.

But back to the memory…

The sweet odor of late August heat and the unmistakable scent of lilies boiling in the afternoon sun is all I can smell. I think it is poetic, if not expected, that there is life bursting everywhere in a celebration of death. The flowers are nauseating, but for the life of me I cannot tear away their beauty. I cannot stop thinking that in a matter of time, they like all of us, will wilt and die.

Only a child could think of something so absolute.

My great-grandfather had died from complications of a stroke. It wasn’t a quick, seamless death, but one that was long and degrading; spanning what I think was 6 months. The type of death that was much more painful for those watching than the actual dying. The horrible, terrible sickening death of watching your husband, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather become someone else, someone foreign until finally he gives way to the final euphoric release of mortality.

Heavy, heavy shit, that no eleven year old wants to think about.