The wind smelled of October. The leaves screamed of it as they fell to the grass, which was now limping and soft and tired. In the backdrop of soon-bare trees, a round blue canvas enveloped everything, streaks of white puffs speckled here and there.
All of this hovered over as they gathered around, heads bowed. The sighs, though low, could be heard above the breeze. The gentle moans and sniffles and coughs united in chorus. The air hung heavy in the bright-light of the day.
A humble old man, aged and grey, could be seen kneeling powerless on the ground next to the priest as the holy man splashed drops from the white plastic bottle over the oak casket, the one in which his son now lay, early. Too early.
And that’s when it hits — that ultimate realization of grief, a whack in the chest, leaving an unseen bruise or scar that will heal far later or possibly never. The weight of it fills upward toward the shoulders, into the neck and throat and there it hangs, swollen and there, undeniable, and the pangs then surface to that wide area behind the face, behind the eyes, ready to fill everything with a deluge of salt and water.
This is when it makes sense to the mind to resist all of that. Push it back, hold it down, fight the deluge. Wall it up. Keep the levees in check. This is oddly familiar territory, and yet it seems easier this time around to hold it all. And why? Because there’s no getting around what happens once those walls come down and the waves rush in. That endless rush, the feeling of being flipped around like a leaf, freshly fallen on violent rapids, walloping over rocks and fizzling in and out of the waves, their white small breaks bashing into one another.
And there it all was, right there, all around the grass in that vast open space on the outskirts of the city. That October grief that is so unlike the grief of July or March or even November, yet reminiscent and nostalgic of those old forms of understanding and not understanding.
They all stood there, relatively silent, surrounding the divine bouquet. The holy man moved about, thanked them all, and a smaller shorter older man also thanked them and wished them well and invited them to a gathering at which they could hug and drink and laugh and cry some more and remember.
Two children ran by unaware of what was happening. The sight of this awakened an awareness in the adults — an awareness that nothing next was certain. They moved off off into the October afternoon light, their feet shuffling through the leaves, a blanket that was the snow of the season, mixed colors of reds and oranges and yellows and browns.
And as they did, one of the children stopped walking, and looked back.
