This Side of the Grass

As you know my sister is dead. And last week my brother-in-law died. I mean we knew it was happening, but—I’ve experienced this before: it begins to seem like the dying will go on forever. Death always makes a grand entrance, it’s not like anything that preceded it. You can’t help but gasp.
it’s one thing when the scythe is swishing through the upper fields, your parents’ generation. But now, my siblings falling at my right and left hand, I feel like a stubborn old tree, or a yellow stalk the reaper missed. I am still here, in the light. There’s nothing I CAN do, except be.

I drive past our family plot every day. Sometimes I blow a kiss up the hill. But I whistle or rather sing (I never could whistle) as I pass, resolute in my vivacity. Theyre there, underground, and I’m not. (I will be, but not today.) No! No! I will put the thought away. AWAY.
Yesterday I threw a handful of dirt on my brother in law’s coffin. For some inexplicable reason I kissed it first! I mean, I didn’t bury my face in it, but I brushed it with my lips, I could feel the grit of the graveyard dust in my teeth all afternoon. I hope it isn’t true what they say about graveyard dirt….when we got home my BMD said we had to take a shower, in case any demons had hitched a ride. I didn’t know anybody believed tap water could banish demons, I did so, to please him, although he pointed out that I hadn’t washed my hair. (He should have told me to brush my teeth.)

So terrible, that vast necropolis. The “stiller town”. “I had not thought death had undone so many”…The awful stones, firmly proclaiming Father, Mother, Beloved Wife…the tiny lambs atop the children’s graves. Yesterday the sky was a dirty white like the gravestones. No. NO. Do not look. Close your eyes in holy dread….

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem called Spring and Fall. It’s addressed to a little girl, Margaret, who is crying as she watches the golden autumn leaves fall. She doesn’t know why she’s crying, but the poet knows: she’s experiencing an intimation of her own mortality:

”It is the blight Man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.”