Yesterday, ten of our family and I stood in a graveyard in Connecticut. We were there to burry my grandmother and the weather was beautiful. Leaves fallen newly from the novemebr trees blew dryly across the grass as we stood together in silence around the fresh plot. A sarcophogus lid of earth lay beside the box filled with her cremated remains. There was my grandfathers’s name and dates cut in a weathered stone imbedded in the grass, thirty-one years with the elements. A tree stood above us with its branches reaching into the late afternoon sky, a sky blue, but not bright. The reverend reached up, too, as she chanted the last blessing. Some of us held hands. I thought I heard a small cry from father, but I did not take my eyes from the grass. Then it was over. And in the breeze that touched us with the tenderness of a mother, a stillness augmented the physical space where we stood in the great silence. We watched, as the two who had been seperated for years were rejoined.
Earlier this year, a friend took his own life. I loved this person. I tried to transform his last action into something positive. But the gravity of his sorrow seemed too strong to overcome. It drew me, and I followed it down into a darkness from which I had to fight to find emancipation. The dark places we shared were illumined within me by his suicide and shone dully, the damned jewels of an inheritance I am duty bound to keep.
My grandmother’s death left me a very different gift. The love we had for one another was different. Though we didn’t spend a lot of time together, we were certain about the love we felt. All the strength she had in life I feel come alive inside me. Her invisible hand reaches within me, brushes the dust from a chest ignored, and unlocks it. She reveals something that was there all along, but something only her love, her spirit, could open.
Mine is not to question these gifts. Mine is to accept what the dead have left for me, for they know something I do not.
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