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.