Mother

My writing always come back to her. I can’t leave this moment in my mind – the day my mom was buried. It haunts me. I’ve written about it from many different perspectives. This is a new one. Not every detail is exactly the way it happened – it is more a piece of my emotions – the way the moment felt for me as a child.

Mother,

I was twelve years old when you were buried. A winter storm drew shadows above the heads of mourners. The smell of wet dirt and dead trees lingered among the crowd dressed in long church coats. My father wore a red tie. It was the only color between the sky and the black road winding through the cemetery. It reminded me of the blood you coughed up the night before you died, the violent way it entered our world. I never knew him before that day you traded places, but I watched his breath rise like smoke as he exhaled the dead air, releasing the winter ghost who haunted the abandoned trees.

I couldn’t see the faces of the mourners, only the way the black clouds formed veils over the freshly dug dirt. I remember the tapping of the branches as they moved in the wind. It seemed the trees were the only presence surrounding me, and the mist rising from the earth filled the air with a thick and unmovable silence.

My father said the burial was brief - a short prayer under the snow. The moment is not suspended in his memory the way it is in mine. Your death to him was God’s will – a thing unknowable and mysterious. I hated God’s will, as I hated winter, and that red tie.

Your sister recalls taking me home after we said goodbye to you. She didn’t understand I no longer had a home – she couldn’t see the two worlds I stood between, the one with you in it, and the one without. She doesn’t remember the red tie, or the way the winter ghost moved darkly through the trees. She didn’t see the snow falling in my unbuckled Sunday shoe as you were lowered in the ground. They never noticed my miss-buttoned dress coat, or the way my satin ribbon came undone and tumbled in the wind, toward you.
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