Saying Goodbye
A simple box, hammered together from a yellowish wood, sits shut, unadorned besides two long wooden handles for carrying and a simple cross carved into one end, almost unnoticeable if you don't know to look. It barely weights anything beyond the weight of wood.
There's nothing in it but another box, made of cardboard and thick tape, the size of a kleenex box, and it takes you a while to realize what it is if you see it in context. Most of the people in the adjacent room, the dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, perhaps two, family and friends and utter strangers, never saw the smaller box. Take the smaller box away, put it into a suitcase, and the suitcase becomes in truth what the wooden box is in perception. But it's the perception which creates the truth, isn't it?
A coffin is, after all, a coffin, whether it holds a person's mortal remains or the burnt remains of the mortal remains.
The sanctuary is all but empty; the service ended an hour ago. It's was a beautiful service. Anne would have loved it. I wish I could say she did love it, but my faith isn't capable of moving one grain of an anthill, and I sort of feel awkward, imagining her, or anyone, watching their own funeral from the rafters like Tom Sawyer, without the punchline where he comes back to life. During the service, I imagined a bolt of sun-bright lightning hitting the box; it bursts into splinters, and Anne rises from the smoking remains of the bottom, as young in body as she was in spirit.
Of course, the imagery required her to be naked, which wasn't something I was at all comfortable with; I glossed over that in favor of the image of Lazarus through Frankenstein.
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone.
Eighty years; it's hard to imagine how many lives one person can touch in eighty years of living until you see the mass of strange faces at their funeral. Of course, Anne was nothing if not remarkable, although I cling with one hand to the belief that every mind on this earth is remarkable. She and George Kent built the Chorus of Westerly into an institution that gets a Wikipedia page. She built a local institution, A Celebration of Twelfth Night, out of medieval tradition and her own fancy. She did more good for Rhode Island than a thousand episodes of Family Guy could undo.
But never again. Her memory lives on, will live on for decades, a hundred years perhaps, but her all-encompassing heart has beat its last; her lips will never smile once more. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, earth to earth.
I stand over the coffin, and, because I feel sort of foolish and useless doing nothing but standing, violently bite at celery sticks. Which makes me feel equally foolish, but not half as useless. Allen, the uncle who joined the family six months before Anne left it, comments that no one seems to like celery; relieved, I step away, and have a brief conversation.
It's easier and harder than I'd expected. Easier, because grief had sort of been leaking out for over a year, since Anne's decline began, like a pressure boiler which lets out the steam before it explodes. It's been coming for longer than that, of course; every storyteller knows that their story must have an end. I'd said goodbye to her as she breathed.
But it's one of those things, like the idea that dusting once forces you to dust again: no matter how often we say it, we always find ourselves needing to say it, one more time, as though this time will be enough, will convey all we mean to say but could never find the words for. This time will be the last.
"I love you, Anne. Goodbye."
And, at last, as I brush my lips against the grain of the wood, a brief feeling of... finality dawns over me; the tears come flowing out. And, at last, I've said it for keeps.
I rise and, not bothering to touch the tears, return to life.
All these memories will be lost, like tears in rain.