Carrying the dead

My sin or folly perhaps has been carrying the dead too long and not giving them back to God, back to the earth, back to the abyss, to the darkness and the quiet.

If I wore a locket for every loved one who has died, I would be weighed down so heavily I would drown when I waded into the sea.

It began with last rites for my chicken.
Her name was Roulette. The hunting dogs ate her and stained her white feathers red.
I dug a grave in the woods for her, and held a funeral alone.

It began with being born. To me it seems we are born into death as much as we are born into life.

It began with being beloved by my grandfather and him dying.

And the natural order of animals on the farm.

And the lack of certain kinds of safety.

Next it was a friend on the elementary school playground.

I don’t understand how my family mourns.

Some lives are filled with more death than others.
When my step-sister’s grandfather died this winter, it was the first close death she had experienced. She was 38 years old.

His was a natural death, a beautiful old man who had lived a very long life.

People have been dropping like flies around me my whole life.

I do like flies. They come to decompose us.
De compose us.

My grandfather had saved up so many chocolate bars for me that they went stale as they were doled out to me after his departure.

My other grandfather lay motionless in a coffin, leading me to ask, “Why is old MacDonald in a box?”

When blonde blue-eyed Jason, who liked to go shirtless and wore a silver cross around his neck, friend to all, died by leaning out of the back of a pick up truck to admire a motorcycle, our elementary school ground became empty, barren. A long stretch of sand with tire swings swaying empty in the breeze.

I stayed good friends with his mother. And years later when she had a baby with an African man and she was still nursing the child when he was three or four, I saw that she had found a way to move on. But I was still unclear on the process.

Of course we carry the dead.

This is some people’s jobs.

But by about three years ago I think the dead grew too heavy and I grew too weak. There were too many. I do not have the shoulders of Atlas. My shoulder broke. Too many family members and pets and friends exiting stage left, stage right, stage front. Everyone going off stage.

I resolve now to put down the beloveds.

To take 40 days to see how far I can heal between now and Easter.

Earth, are you ready?

I know that you are.