"There is nothing cheerful or comforting in the death of a mother," thought Evens, "people only distract from the grieving process. Most whom come to funerals," he thought, "are deeply lacking in the sense of sacredness of privacy."
He had respected and loved his mother while she lived, and wanted to be alone with her now that she was dead, to keep her urn, in his living room.
"So many take away the grip that you once had of her memory, it slips from your hands. It is good sense," he told the other person inside of him "to pay them no attention as they look and listen, wait, listening to their breathing, waiting for the storm of curiosity." Thus he came to realize such events, this event with the people involved only made the few like him suffer all the more horrors. And in the face of fact, his mother's long hard role in life was now at its end, and being played out he didn't care to hear any noises of people beating the anvil for attention and gossip, at the funeral.
He went to a bookstore, put his head down, his hands into his face, became near to an unconscious state, feeling the sensation God had created, called grief, waiting for the full visualization of Heaven's parading, for her arrival, to be ended.
"Those people," he murmured, while sitting at this cafe table at the bookstore, "play a life and death game, holding this, all in the fingers of their hands and feeling nothing." Then he sat back in his chair took a sip of his coffee, looked about.
There he said, with burning cheeks, listening to the dead woman's whispering "I'm okay with it, I was ready..., would you have liked me to live the way I was?"
A shill runs through him, Diane, his friend showed up, sat down by him, her mother had died recently. He didn't want company, but he allowed it.
"I'll perhaps become the scandal of the family for not showing up at the funeral," he told her.
"We all grieve in our own ways," she remarked.
He passed with him the night in the heat of the summer in his small apartment on Albemarle Street, tears came into his eyes. For a long time he walked airlessly here and there. The thrill of summer was in the air, and the sparrows sang in the trees, he planned a trip to the Galapagos.
But for that moment, from that moment-death took on a new picture, a new seriousness, accompanied by voices, dread of people, not dread of people per se but that they would not allow him to grieve in his own way. "Did God send this sorrow as a warning for me to get ready? A reminder that time is short, to find that narrow path?"
"To speak ill of another person while in grieving, is utterly bad," thought Evens. "But it is the other side of a person's face you see, you must catch it before it vanishes, disappears, lest it get away and you become blind to this unspeakable blankness." It brings to mind all eager days the same folks had greeted him with warmly not so long ago. How they gossiped over the daily details of life; the sensational events in newspapers, television; and now their revolting cries, unable to restrain their curiosity why he didn't go to the funeral, and other why's and questions. There horrid mess of gossip over and over on their tongues.
He had come to the conclusion, such people: "They live their lives stretched out," he told that hidden voice inside of him, "fixed in houses, all linking one to another. Year after year, washing the same dishes, ironing the same clothes, with only their fingers occupied. Thus minds reading trash, if reading anything at all. They live in empty rooms in the dark, waiting, hurriedly eating, sleeping, gossiping, waiting for the blessing of the community, with their fixed ideas and clinging onto them; having taken their heavy eyes off their sins to get that morsel of something to chew on, with those loose tongues; to die unseen, unknown, hoping for a new life to come, wasting the one they now live."
No: 790 (4-6-2011)
SA
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