TWO WEEKS

It's been two weeks since my mother died. Time is a strange thing, confusing and misleading. Time makes you think all is well or nothing will ever be well again.Time throws everything off. It zips right along just as if nothing has happened.

I knew my mother would die. She told us so just a few days earlier. But the main thing that told me she was thinking about dying was the way she started to bend her arm at the elbow and put it under her head. This was a clear sign.

I have never liked burials, especially leaving the casket sitting above ground while everybody leaves to go home. So I decided to do it differently. After the funeral we went to the cemetery, took our places and Bob read a short scripture with a prayer. The casket was then lowered into the ground, not a vault, but the dirt. I took a shovel, filled it, and threw the dirt into the open grave. The sound of the dirt hitting the casket was unlike anything I had ever heard before. The shovel was then passed to the rest of the family and anyone else who wanted to participate. Then the tent, chairs, fake grass were all removed and the gravediggers filled the grave and smoothed the dirt as best they could. We all went home.

It was a healing thing to me to stay until the burial was complete. I felt like I had finished taking care of my mother.

Now that two weeks have passed, I find it difficult to express my feelings. My mother and I were much alike, we mourn privately. I don't like for anyone to see me cry and go to great lengths to see that they don't. So most of my sadness has been by myself. My mother would have understood that.