“I hope we aren’t late. We can’t be late,” becomes, as my husband and I rush into the church, “Oh here it is, it is happening now.” The casket. Everyone dressed in light blue, Grandpa’s favorite color. And there is Grandma, leaning on her daughters instead of her walker, to follow her husband’s casket into the church, her husband of seventy years, walking behind just as our relatives from the Old Country must have done for generations, following the caskets of even more distant relations through the village streets and to the graveyard, then home for chicken paprikash and spaetzle. And now here we are, with those processing in behind the casket. We hadn’t decided if we wanted to do that, but now the choice is made for us because we were almost late getting here, this day of all days, because we were getting two toddlers into dress clothes at a hotel and it took longer than we thought.
So we enter the church as everything is beginning, and now we are part of the family procession and even as I am trying to grasp how one says goodbye after a seven-decade marriage, how one can be a separate being after so many years together, I’m also thinking, I hope my husband is holding our daughter the right way. She’s wearing a dress and I hope it’s not all bunched up at her waist, I hope he’s remembered to lay it flat. But then it’s happening, oh this is happening this is happening, they start pushing the casket and behind it is Grandma, walking with her unsteady shuffle step, and we are all walking towards the big cross at the front of the church. The narrow vestibule opens to soaring ceilings.
And now we are lined up and processing in, like how we would line up at Christmas for Grandpa to pass out the envelopes, one for each person, the stack high in his big hands, the hands that fought in Korea and worked three jobs at a time. It was one envelope per person, our names written in all capital letters, top right– first his ten children, then their spouses, then all their children and their spouses, and now, their children too. All down the line.
But we aren’t lined up there, we are here, and the light blue is everywhere, his favorite color, and all the family that chose to sit in the pews turn towards the aisle, eyes blurry and faces pinched. And their emotions magnify ours as we come closer and all the blue blurs and the collective loss lands hard on my chest, and my chest fully absorbs the blow it’s been anticipating for a week, since the news that this round in the hospital would be the last.
Now we are filing into our seats and the casket stands alone in the aisle, strong in its dark wood, stands like the man inside did when he stood on this earth. And the dark wood reminds me of a family story repeated into lore, how once when I was a newborn, my grandfather was rocking me and the chair broke beneath him, just fell apart into pieces. How my mother came into the room and there he was, sprawled on the ground atop splintered wood, yet holding me so securely that I was still asleep. In response to the memory, I squeeze my son closer to my chest and we finally find our seats in the pew. And now we are all here and the blue and the loss is too much but it can’t be too much, not yet, because I am the eldest grandchild, the eldest of twenty-seven, and I am expected up at the podium.
Sarah Barbo Nielsen is a writer, energy executive, and Army veteran who lives near the Colorado mountains with her family. Her work has been published in In a Flash and Ekphrastic Review, and nominated for Best Small Fictions. She grew up in Ohio with her big extended family.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Guy Mayer
