Funeral March


It was a rather cold day that one Sunday, even for a funeral. People dressed in black crowded the cemetery for the funeral. It was the second day that I’d been here and already I knew that I was not the normal fourteen-year-old that most would find anywhere. A spot close to the fringe of the forest had been chosen for the honoured deceased. Most said that she had loved the forest when she was younger, I knew for a fact that she absolutely crazed over the forest for her whole life. The wistful look in her eyes whenever she recounted the forests around the town burned in my mind and I felt myself feeling wistful too.
As I watched the undertaker’s hearse pull up and the mahogany and oak panelled coffin being lifted onto the shoulders of the men that had once been somewhat close to her I had to grip the tree tightly to stop myself from hurling myself into the ongoing ceremony and try to wrestle the coffin out of the men’s grip, not letting them to reach the spot where the officials of the cemetery had chosen for the dearly deceased.
The funeral march echoed hollowly through the chilly cemetery. I had to tear my eyes away from the coffin as they lowered it into the ground. I felt myself shaking in anger and grief as the sound of the coffin landing softly on the hard-packed earth reached my ears. Then, most of the mourners threw handfuls of earth into the grave hole and most of them just watched as a few of them stepped forward to recite the nice things that the deceased had done before her rather untimely death.
Most of them hardly knew her, and did say a few nice things about her that she might have done during the time of her youth but I doubted it. As much as it suited her, she wouldn’t have done things that were so drab that it sounded like it had been taken out of a book that had been written about funerals. I could have laughed at some of the things that they said about the dearly departed if I hadn’t been so sad.
A few of the mourners were dead right about some of the things that they said about the deceased. It was only a few moments after that I realized that they could only be her children. I’d never actually thought of her as the mother of children. She more or less reminded me of someone that I would have known no matter what age I was.
A man clutching a woman’s hand tightly in his own stepped to the hole just then. He was a middle-aged man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair like it had been a dark shade twenty years earlier. His eyes were a pale green and I recognized the kindness in his eyes. He was tall and looked like was just holding it together for some reason or another. He spoke a few words that I took to account, “She was the best mother in the whole world.”
The woman that must have been his wife just patted his hand solemnly and both of them stepped away as another woman stepped towards the hole. She was tall and would have looked strong if only she hadn’t been shaking and trying to compose herself without breaking into sobs. I could not see her face behind the veil but I saw the glinting of those familiar startling green that I could now only imagine. “She really was the best person in the world especially as a mother and a teacher,” the woman managed to choke out.
I acknowledged her for that. She really had been the best person in the whole world. The woman, retreated back to her family, the man in the woman’s arms and three slighter figures dressed in black. Her grandchildren, I realized. My throat convulsed as I registered this. Two of them, two boys were looking mournfully at the hole in the ground while the one other figure; a slender girl raked her eyes over everything like she couldn’t believe anything. She had inherited those startling green eyes, but instead of the kindness that I would have expected to see in them, I only saw fire in them; anger.
Her eyes stopped when her eyes scanned over the tree I was hiding in and something inside me told me that I should hate her. I didn’t know why exactly but the hate in me burst through into my mind and I barely managed to push it back into the more controlled space of my mind. Maybe it was because she was the one person that I would have loved to be if I’d been given a chance. I shrugged it off when her eyes continued on their only purpose; scanning.
The cemetery hands started shovelling the dirt over the coffin and I had to avert my eyes not to flit over and tear at their hands to stop them. She’d never belonged in the earth anyway. I stopped shaking when they suddenly stopped shovelling the dirt. I looked up and saw a man in a rather moth-eaten black suit step forward.
He looked strong even with the suit on him and had a tall yet lean build. He had a rather brutal face and had a rather hard air over him but his eyes, dark and deep as they seemed, were filled with both anger and paralysing pain as he looked down at the half earthed coffin in sadness.
“A good friend and a better tutor,” he said in a hard voice.
Then, he stepped away and literally disappeared into the crowd. Her daughter followed his path with sad eyes. The cemetery hands just shrugged at each other and continued their digging. I stayed there until everyone had disappeared. As the cemetery hands took off laughing about some joke that one of them had said.
I slipped out of the bough that I’d been hiding in and made my way to the newly flattened earth. My throat convulsed as I saw the new addition to the garden of tombstones.



Here Lies,

Lucinda Hannah Grant

Beloved mother and
Grandmother

1929-2010

I kneeled down on the newly covered hole and touched the cold marble. The wind whipped around, scattering most of the dried leaves around the cemetery. I felt my tears flowing as I said, “Goodbye, old friend. You’re in a better place now.”
It felt like it was final, like I was agreeing that she was dead, and I knew that it was true. The only friend that I’d ever had was dead and I knew why. It was because of me.