Sacred Sorrow

Stillness, lifting eyelids, dilation

My head on your chest, listening, nothing

Screaming into the bed you once shared with mom

Screaming till I almost passed out

Crying in the shower

Wet pillow from tears

Wrapped in your housecoat

I drenched in one of your colognes

Funeral home

Casket shopping

An empty snow-covered field

Picking a plot

Buying a new outfit for a funeral, who does that

Crying in the change room

Medication to numb the screaming in my head, and the sobs in the church

The pew, the closeness of bodies, feeling suffocated in a huge auditorium

Why a luncheon after a funeral?

The abyss of condolences, I turn robotic

Hugs that feel like strangulation, while others feel like a warm summer day

I long for an invisible cloak to hide under

No marathon runner here, this is a different kind of endurance

Home to shower, wash away the day we put you in the ground

Putting my new outfit in the garbage, after wearing it once

Feeling wasteful, put in goodwill bag wanted to tag it “worn only once to my dead dad’s funeral”

The first seven days were the hardest

How can I live a life without you in it?

Seven years later, the mourning has turned into dancing

Sacred Sorrow