A Funeral Day

After the services, dead but not dead, I sat in our only armchair with my hands holding either arm.  The upholstery was green tweed.  Or big blue flowers on beige.  Or brick-red worn thin with batting and wood showing through.  I see my hands on the arms, his wedding band stuck on my finger and held from falling off by my wedding band stuck on after.  But I can’t see what fabric the chair was or if my legs crossed at the knee or at the ankle or if my ankles ran parallel down to the brown rug and angled side by side there and flat.  I can’t see that.  We were dead, you see, these parts of us—hands, feet, the stuff in between.  And not.  I watched people move  They moved as if falling through water.  But not, obviously not, as they paused, exchanged nods, bubbles of small talk with other participants halting from slow descents (or ascents) through currents I could not see. 

The embers cooled and went out on the fire screen and new sparks hung there and died.  The log was spitting itself free.  Flaring in size just to fade.  Strange to remember the sparks but not the covering on the armchair.  Did I nod when people came close? and if I nodded could they see that it was me? my head that bobbed up and down agreeing with something said?  Or:  was my presence a figment of communal imagination?  was I the one passed and Al the one somewhere about—shoulder leaned into a porch post and head cocked to one side—listening?  My mind is of two worlds.  I decided all those years ago to rise from my armchair and walk out among them.  I was invisible.  Truly.  Known, like an earthquake is known to animals before the ground shakes, but invisible: I was Death they could sense but not feel.   I wore double-knit, dark gray.  The skirt was very long.  The belt, very wide.  And when I moved among them, his friends and siblings on the front and back porches of our life, they parted to let me pass.  They parted as schools of minnows would part to go round a bit of wavering root.  Or flooded grass.

I wasn’t sad.  I was something different on the day of Al’s funeral: an observer of sparks caught in screens and deep pools of trapped friends, fathers, mothers, siblings.  It comes to me now . . . the armchair was brick-red, a warm rust corduroy with wide wales and too new to have worn through to the wood under the batting the way it did six years ago when the last reupholstering made it checkered.  Blue and ecru, I believe.

~ end ~

TITLES:

A Funeral Day
[journalese]

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