How You Care for the Dead Tells the World Everything About Who You Really Are

 

How You Care for the Dead Tells the World Everything 

About Who You Really Are

 

Somewhere, perhaps among the living,

a bell began pealing,

insidious, solemn, obsessive,

and there was no one left to tell

the echo from the final stroke.

                                           D.  Nurske

                                           A Path in Grace

 

It seems like your greatest

betrayal, the final abandonment

 

there’s no coming home from.

All along you allowed her

 

to believe you’d be beside her

in the end and the stone even

 

says so.  Going on fourteen

years now, her being dead

 

has to seem, still to this day,

like a freedom four decades

 

in the making.  Your name

has been filling with small bits

 

of seasonal detritus, random

as the wind.  Garden dirt.

 

Birch leaves.  Blueberry blossoms

dried on the bushes when

 

the bees are too few.  The face

of it is washed out some by

 

the wet weather, or a polish

of fog on the glossy parts. 

 

Her name, her age.  When you

both were married.  I think

 

maybe what’s hardest for me

to believe is that you’d rather

 

be with strangers, even dead,

cremated and stuffed into

 

a different ground.  It’s your call.

We all have our own romances

 

with the dead and buried. 

I don’t believe she waits for you 

 

anymore, not in that sense,

and ultimately we all go

 

back to the earth, right?  I want

to believe that for your sake.

But it's like

when Sammy shot himself

 

on Mother’s Day in his mother’s

bedroom. He was her twin

 

sister’s only son.  The church

refused him a consecrated plot.

 

Still, her mother, having bought

two spots in the Protestant

 

(they had their own lapses

with dogma) cemetery, allowed

 

him his small comfort of family

under a quiet tree, a place

 

shunning all ambiguity.  His name.

His dates.  He’s there.  They’re

 

there.  Someone cared

enough not to abandon him

 

to his own

potter’s field, alone under

 

a stone.  Or worse.  No stone.

I bet you think it doesn’t

 

matter.  Or, no.  I bet you

think it does matter, which makes

 

you want something grander

something you think

 

you deserve.  That you’ll be

visited there.  And no one will know

 

you were abandoning

again and finally, after all

 

these years of abandoning

(and they’ll praise you

 

for your service, and not know,

how could they know, being strangers)

 

sixty miles away the ashy bones

of your wife repose as best

 

as you could set and left them.

To me, the least you could do

 

is disinter her and bring her

with you.  But you won’t do that.

 

When we’re all gone, her last

place in this earth will come up

 

under no scrutiny or benevolence.

No one will pass or know to,

 

being at the edge of the woods

you dug her into, that stone

 

sunk deep and in time obliterated.

Her final end.  Hidden. 

 

Like she never mattered.

Or even existed.