The Funeral

We walk amidst the stones and the green grass cut to a certain length
we wonder if the widow who leans heavily on Uncle Tom's arm will
fall away from him, the slump of her grief draining away from the
removal of all she loved, the loss of his quiet solitary strength.
I find myself wishing for a gentle fall of rain, misting the black coats
of the funeral party as we wander through the sentinels of the deceased,
some engravings call out, demanding the focus of our roving eyes as
we struggle to maintain the sobriety of that this occasion denotes.
My thought is this, as the men with their long steel shovels begin,
is this all we are reduced to, a coffin, some tears, a few flowers soon
to be gone, disappearing into the soft brown loam of the ground,
was it all for this we live, to survive living, some renown to win.
Who will remember us longer for more than how we ended up dying?
no one will recall our obituary or eulogy or that story from cousin Saul,
fading away like the hymn that we will all try to sing in tune at the hole
everyone will be recognized for caring enough to attend, thanked for the
effort, the love, the words, even if for some of us it was just lying.

We walk away from that we all feared more than this his death,
wanting to be elsewhere, far from the silence that permeates the day
the remembrances of those things he did, more than the words that
he may or may not have said, with his passing, his final breath.
What was the bitter truth is no longer as important of what there is to save
of the scraps that he left behind, who gets what, we go on without him,
dividing what we think defined him, missing the importance of what
happened as we walked together as one to find his grave.