About a Southern death

The funeral was at 2PM on Saturday in Midlands South Carolina. The whole scene - the church, the people, the land - was like something Flannery O'Connor wrote.

In the baptist church pews I sat with my spine grinding on the hard wood if I leaned back too much, and with my husband beside me staring towards the coffin. He never knew his late aunt well, but everyone said she was a good lady. A few people - only men - spoke from the pulpit about Aunt Laura's life. One man recalled her selfless spirit and read the description of "the virtuous woman" from Proverbs 31in the Bible. Another talked about how she loved her family, and then digressed into a sermony speech about expressing how much you care to those you love. I drifted out into my own thoughts a little before he started stabbing at the air with his righteous first finger to the downbeats of his halelujahs.

I'd never met Aunt Laura nor seen a photo of her. And the only part of her I could see where she lay in her box was a cloud of whitish hair peeking above the rim. I looked around the room at the bright-colored, flag-like banners bearing Christian symbols hanging from the high walls. Soft natural light seeped through the stained glass windows like a quiet ghost, and I noticed no one was crying. I realized I was wrong when the immediate family filed down to the back doors behind the casket-carrying pallbearers. Those who would feel her loss most still had tears. The lid had been lowered and the white cloud disolved under it, and I thought maybe I had imagined it there.

I gave the reverence due to the dead and to death, and to the force that balances life with death. We followed the caravan to the gravesite at the cememtery. Saturday was warm, and the first sunny day in weeks. I looked around at the people now, the young, the older and the elderly. My husband held me close to him where we stood among the marble markers of death, and I saw many others also holding their loved ones.

I tell this story because, despite the sorrow surrounding a death, we can be thankful, even happy. I was happy to be there with my husband his family, and thankful that I can feel love as deeply as I do. Aunt Laura, I'm sure, would have wanted us to be thankful for life and feel the sun shining on our shoulders instead of contemplating the end of those things. Though I never knew her, I know she lived passionately and that people loved her as she loved them. With luck and good sense, I'll live in that path.