Six-year-olds are not particularly light, but in comparison to letting one run roughshod over the service, letting him sit piggyback for an hour or two isn’t that bad. I shifted him to my right hip when the minister stopped talking. I shifted him to my left hip when we sang all however-many verses of “Amazing Grace”. I slung him over a shoulder when everyone started filing up to light candles. I shushed him but once: “Hush, Danny. Everyone is sad.” And he shushed good.

I’m not sure that anyone ever actually knows what to say when someone dies, or if I’m convinced by arguments that humans used to live much better and more closely with death. More frequent meetings, sure, but how can you have a relationship that is “close” or “better” with something that snatches your beloved from you while dealing only pain? I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I kept the 6-year-old out of everyone else’s hair, and I brought tissues. With the aloe lotion shit, yo.

And I tried to guard my friend–my best friend,from high school, for almost half our stupid lives–from the well-meaning but idiotic people who didn’t have the sense to know that they didn’t know what to say.
“‘I am not gone; I am nearer than breath; nearer than your hands and feet.’ The relationship just changes. I would be honoured if you would share with me when your father contacts you.”
“I don’t even know who that woman is,” my friend muttered through her teeth. I grabbed one of the towels she and her sister had been hiding from the rain under during the service, and sponged some water out of her hair.
“Dione–” I said, and my fucking voice cracked, and the sheer inadequacy of anything I could say hit me, and I started swearing about not being able to fix anything worth fixing until we both fell on each others’ shoulders and sobbed like the adults we’ve almost become. Quietly. Shakily.

I suspect that trying to find the good in everything is pathological. Sometimes good things come of shit, and sometimes just shit comes of shit, and there’s no use denying it. Heart disease in the guise of indigestion struck my friend’s father down at what’s usually midlife, and believe me–there’s no good come of it. Most people who die these days are old and have chronic diseases of some sort, and so people tell my friend things like, “At least he wasn’t suffering.” Yeah, that’s a real cold comfort. She railed for a few minutes about all the stupid shit people say to her, but especially how someone dying slowly, you get to say everything you ever wanted to say to them before they’re gone, and maybe you can actually believe it when it happens.

After the service I went hunting for the sweater I’d left neatly on the coatrack by the door. “Ah,” said my friend. “That was your first mistake.” I found it on someone sitting around a firepit in the backyard, behind the gazebo where I found the minister taking hits off a bong with the widow, dulling the pain. Several hundred people crowded the yard that day, and most of them brought food and all of them helped clean the house or the yard or clear out the garage, and if you were a fucking Pollyanna you might argue that’s something good has come of this death, but if you’re me, you just know deep down that it’s shit. This family, they’re loved by their community, and they were loved before he died of a broken heart.

“You’d think it’s really hard–but it gets easier. He was blue at first, but he got–paler. And cold.”

And so too does the grief, my love. Rage on, against the dying of the light.