Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The pastor promises the dead don't leave us.

They come back to you, she said. It might be in a song or a dream, but they come back.

We stood in a field of grass and graves with heat pushing down and the sound of a passing train. The dead are not here, I think, but we are.

The dead may leave us in body, but they never leave us alone.


The service ended and we walked through a quiet crowd of women in summer dresses, fresh cigarettes.


I knew more than one person buried here.


Jerry asked, is Ed here?


I think so. Can we look for his grave?


We propped the bike on a gravel lane near the mausoleum and I hoped and did not hope to find Ed's grave. In less than five minutes I was looking down at his family's name. Brother, mother, father. I heard Jerry read Ed's full name. Looking at the embossed letters and pushing away at the overgrown grass, Jerry said, he won the bronze star? Huh.


He was such a cranky bastard, I said. He just hated the world.


Yes he did, Jerry said, but I liked him.


As we walked away I turned back. What day did he die?


Finding his stone again I saw June 30, 2010. Ed's last day.


I wish I had known, I said.


Around this time last year I wrote about the friend I visited today at his daughter's memorial service: Tomorrow I will see my friend and do my best to console the inconsolable.

Everyone will hug him, kiss him, and he will be shuffled along maybe not remembering each of us, the time, the day, if he had breakfast, and wondering how anything really matters.

To Ed, I wrote: A few days too late when I learned that Ed died. I remember his face and hair and funny lisp. Stories about Kansas and motorcycles and bikers in bars sloshing beer and Jack Daniels. Fists with grime under the nails. Tattoos. His stories from Vietnam rush back.

He was funny and endearing and at times insightful. He had been most places before I was born, including Vietnam.


He laughed and suffered and got up for work everyday.


War robbed many things from him and replaced them with anger, but he loved his niece and everyone knew it. He was good to her. Now the earth has him back and I didn't even know until too late.


Maybe the dead never leave. Ed is still here. My grandmother is in my head all the time, and I wonder how much of our thoughts are really our own.

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