Dirt

A few days ago, I found myself shoveling dirt into my grandfather's grave.
So
that was something.

I made it through the entire funeral service without shedding a tear.  The words that people spoke about him, they were so beautiful and so true and they made me believe in the most wonderful things he always taught us.  He always taught everyone.
I sat with my cousins and I watched the back of my mother's head, my grandmother's profile,
I thought about what it meant for them
to lose a father or a husband, it is not the same.

But we all felt it at the gravesite
the first grains of earth falling back into their place
finding their way home
this time with him.

Watching my mother then, with the first shovel full of dirt, tears were no longer an issue;
they just were.
Everywhere.
Unavoidable, unstoppable,
I don't even know if they meant anything, just that I couldn't control this fountain that had suddenly sprung from within me, not from my eyes or even heart but from the very core of my being, the core which told me that I needed to get used to the past tense, that this was a forever thing, that yes he had died but now he is dead, and that it a forever kind of fact.

Finally taking the shovel felt right, and the more I scooped and dropped into the grave the more it felt that way, like a task we were bound to,
burying our own dead,
repaying him for everything he had given us and given the world
It was the least we could do, to put him to rest like that, even though I know he wasn't really in there.

The more I shoveled the more it felt like a task to which I had pledged, and I didn't want to stop except for the throngs of people who were waiting for the shovel, and I had to give them a turn, and so I stabbed the tapered edge into the half-way frozen dirt and left the handle for someone else to take over.

The sharp heels of my shoes dug into the freezing snow on the ground and I thought it was convenient that the snow didn't ruin the trailing hem of my skirt as much as the bare ground would have.  The hem that just barely kissed the ground when I was careful, that got caught underneath my toes when I wasn't,
and I wondered how I could think of my skirt at all at a time like this,
a time when snow was swirling around us
when our hands were freezing
when he must be freezing
(even though I know he wasn't really in there)
when the earth was finally finding its way home.

I am bad at death, I am bad at knowing what to do
except hold my mother's hand and squeeze her when they first bring the casket out of the car,
watching my father and brother and uncles and cousins carry him, I do not know how they can be so close to him and not trip down the stairs,
and so I keep my hand on my mother's back and wonder
if she is doing this more for me or for her.

But here is what I know:
He taught me more than he could ever realize, because like they said,
he gave more than he ever remembered.
He changed the world for good
in both senses of the phrase
and he changed everyone he met in the same two senses.
He wasn't in there.
Whatever felt so right about shoveling the dirt was, for once, not metaphorically resonant, but simply exactly what it was; the meeting of two creations of God; dust to dust and ashes to ashes; the final act of all of us who had not appreciated him in every moment that we could, who didn't get to say our goodbye, who thought he would have one more day; the least, and the last, we could do.