Part 6

Dear Friends and Gentle Readers,

     I know that I've been going on about being more positive around here, but that's not really being authentic. I have been having a hard time emotionally, and it's really not in me to thing of pleasant or informative things to write about. Thankfully, the name of this blog is "First Person Narrative" and as such, I feel that I am able to forego actual blog posts for a while and just share some of my writing with you. 

     In March, I shared with you an excerpt from a larger essay I wrote about going home and visiting the cemetery. Over the next two weeks, while I do some serious self-care, I am going to share the rest of this story with you. I hope you enjoy it. 

xo,

     Uranium J

Click here to read the first part of the essay.

Click here for Part 2.

Click here for Part 3.

Click here for Part 4.

Click here for Part 5

Part 6

The whole community came together to raise money for the funeral. Burying one person is neither easy nor cheap. To bury five people at one time who had no insurance would have broken the survivors. News crews descended on the little town of Lake Como where the tragedy had occurred. My best friend says that he remembers the news trucks blocking the road in front of his house.

The older little girl had been a year behind me in school. I had seen her around, but didn’t really know her. My mom was friends with the grandmother which is why we were at the funeral. Apparently, she was the first babysitter I had ever had. I don’t remember it, having been a baby, but I was there to pay my respects all the same.

There were hundreds of people at the graveside service. The local funeral home barely contained all the caskets during the viewing. In later years, as I began attending more and more funerals in that space I marveled at how they could have fit five caskets in that space with all the flowers (and there were flowers, let me tell you) when it seemed that one casket barely fit. Granted, three of them were small.

I remember going to see the bodies, and trying to be stoic about it all. It’s not as though I had never seen a body. My mother was always very open about death with me and by that time I was a funeral veteran. I don’t think I was able to keep my composure. It was a tragic thing and even as a third grader, I could understand that.

I was looking at little girls younger than me. They weren’t supposed to be in coffins – they were supposed to be playing with Barbies. And their daddy had done this to them. That’s a lot for an adult to digest. I remember being haunted by them for a while afterward. Even though I hadn't known them in life, they were with me in death. Ghosts were no longer fun characters in books about the civil war – they were little girls who just wanted to play with their daddy.