(no subject)
My son gave me this little something he wrote for extra credit in his English class. He made me cry. I wanted to share.
1/7/10
Les Pédales Dernier
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I stepped forward. Slowly and surely, I traversed toward the box with great anxiety and fear. It seemed as though everything else was blotchy and hard to see apart from the long opened case. My right hand was clasped tightly around a thin piece of tissue in my pocket. I could feel the presence of my mother ushering me forward with ease. Her hand was the only thing that kept me from falling down. At last she was there. My beautiful aunt. Though her eyes were closed, I could still feel her radiant smile in my heart.
Without being prepared for it. Without a trace from where it came from, a tear fell out of my eye. I could not bear to see her like this. I returned to my place in the crowd, and I hung my head. The guitars and flutes of heaven seemed to play for my family, easing our pain. As I ran my fingers through my untidy hair, I took a deep breath. Looking at my family go through this time of woe was excruciatingly hard to take. There was a minute where I felt the whole world stop completely. This is when I spotted them.
A beautiful set of dark red roses had been laid to the side of my aunt’s casket. Some of the roses were fading and dying already, but three remained beautiful. They were alone and ignored by the rest of the other exuberant arrangements of flowers. After all was cleaned up, and we were about to say our last goodbyes to my aunt, my mother picked up the roses. I asked why she had taken them instead of placing them to rest with Tia Ninfa. Her response was that she had already selected flowers to rest on her grave. She was going to take the roses home and keep them as a reminder of her sister.
We drove home that day, silent. My mother took the three roses that were still alive, and tied them together. She hung them on the wall of the one room everyone would see. I sometimes ponder about the roses and their aged beauty. It’s been three years since my aunt passed away, and the roses are still as beautiful as the day I first saw them.
As Chuck Palahniuk once said, “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever; the goal is to create something that will.” This is the one quote that I really understood about death. And in realization of this quote, I learned to accept my aunt’s death. Les pédales dernier will live forever. Along with my aunt’s smile and the joyous memories that she left us with.