It was finished, the funeral was over and
that was the day before yesterday. And I suppose for the family it was a matter
of fact, it was as if he had never been. Everyone grabbed everything he had to
show, as if he had never been in the house he owned, and lived. The meager family,
celebrated, pitied, but did not mourn.
After the wake, departing, separating, the gave of the old man, who had
made little enough hold on our lives at best, whom all of us knew without any
of us ever really knowing, was once more alone: this time in his coffin. It was
to the family, as if none of him had ever happened.
Perhaps at the end, that’s all we all get, I got thinking.
To me, grandpa was more than an illusion, he was flesh and blood, and he
was never young, always old. Wherever in life I’d go, he’d cast his shadow.
#3877 (4-24-2013)
Poetic Prose, Confessional
