All That Remains

I went to the burial. First off, I don't really know what to say about it. There wasn't a service. She wasn't actually buried. My uncle said a few words, his father-in-law said a prayer, everyone gathered around the table her urn was upon and most everyone cried. A few people brought flowers.

I stood at the back of the crowd, looking at the stone urn sitting on the table, and I thought, That's all that remains of her.

But then I realized that it's not. Inside that urn is what is left of her body, scorched and pulverized into ashes and bone. But there is more of her left in this world than the contents of a jar. What remains of my cousin, I realized, was reflected in the faces gathered around that table in the cemetery. In their tears and their memories of her. It was in the seven hundred and fifty people who showed up at her funeral, all crying, all claiming her as their best friend. She left pieces of herself in every kind act, every smile, every moment that changed someone's day, someone's life. She is acutely visible in how close our family has become, how intently we've leaned on each other in the last several weeks, how willing we now are to hug and tell each other we love them. She exists still anytime someone looks at her life, her death, and feels something -- joy, sorrow, laughter, love, anger. She is in the lessons we have learned about life's brevity and the way we choose to act with our knowledge.

What's left of my cousin isn't in a pot in a hole in the ground. What's left of her isn't a headstone or a spot in the corner of a cemetery. The memories that I keep of her, the way I've been affected by her and this tragedy, the fact that I'm not the only one who feels this way, that's what remains of her. And that is so much larger, so much more important, than the contents of that urn.

What do we actually bury?

There's a burial on Friday. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I've been doing better with the whole thing. I haven't cried in over a month, and I don't immediately feel my heart drop whenever I think about her. I do think about her, a lot more now than I did when she was alive, a fact that gives me tingles of guilt. I have her pictures everywhere. She comes up in casual conversation. The tattoo on my wrist is dedicated to the type of person she was, and I look at it so many times a day.

Her parents make me nervous now. I don't know how to be around them. I don't want to pretend like nothing happened, like she never existed, go on as though life is as it always was when I know that it isn't. At the same time, I don't feel right mentioning her, bringing her up, talking about her, when I know that it causes them such heartbreak. I can't decide which I think is worse -- hurting them by ignoring her life, or hurting them by remembering her death.

At first, I didn't want to go to the burial. I don't handle pain well. I can manage my own just fine, especially when I have some time alone to process it and let it trickle through me. But the pain of others is difficult to bear. It infests my spirit, nibbling away at my insides. I've never had an easy time being around the hurting, dying, disturbed of the world. I want to absorb it and ease them of their suffering. In some ways, I succeed at this and that's a problem. The task is not to intake others pain, but to help them dispose of their burden in other ways. Without knowing what to do, what to say, how to act, I don't know how to do this for my aunt and uncle. Which is why I was unsure about the burial.

But I realized that, afraid as I am of the pain of others, I want to go. I want to be there for me. I couldn't look at her body, didn't want to remember her that way, but it'll help to have one final goodbye. I'm hoping that it will help me move past this, gain some sense of closure. I'm not entirely sure it will make any difference. I'm not entirely sure that anything will make a difference.

This is, by far, the strangest and most horrendous experience I've ever gone through.

Shit. I had gone a month without crying. Count starts over.