Friends in passing, Tramonti di Sotto, 21 February 2014

I don’t know when it occurred to me that I might always have been moving from county-to-country, from town-to-town so that I would never get to know anyone well enough to have to go to their funeral. 

Now i live in a small town and I have already been to two funerals. One was for Nonna who was our neighbor and was 94 when she died a couple of weeks after her birthday party. Today was the funeral of a neighbor’s mother, who I had never met.

I realize, in the end, we go to a funeral for ourselves, for memories, for love, for friendship, and for the people who remain standing around the grave. I was reminded of my father’s funeral, the soldier playing the last post on his trumpet, the golden light. Uncle Eddie standing behind us and telling us to leave before our father’s coffin was covered. “It is too final,” he said. Then the wake at our house after the funeral when all the people came. “Come like a wedding,” said the butcher man.

They had looked all over Jamaica for a Union Jack to drape over our father’s coffin. In the end they draped a Jamaican flag. A soldier was there who told me that our father was the best commander that he had ever had. It reverberated to think that someone knew Daddy before I was born and, seeing his name in the paper, had come to pay his respects. I only wish that I had listened better when he told me his name and shook my hand.

Where I live now, there are about 420 residents. The small church is full. Maybe half of us are here. The rest still at work somewhere in the valley. A small boy looks up at me from an upside down position. He hangs by one arm from the back of a pew. Candles have been lit, I think of lighting candles for friends who have recently died in Jamaica. In the church, the pale pink and white flowers remind me of weddings and spring time. Small bunches of flowers are thrown into the grave. Again I think of weddings and spring time, not funerals and death.

The mountains surround the cemetery where we stand. I love these rugged, silent sentinels, the cloud mothers. I see their summits are blanketed. Where we stand it is sunny and warm after all the rain. I know that in the morning, when the clouds have lifted from the peaks, there will be a fresh layer of snow. 

Leaving the cemetery we pass Nonna’s tomb. The Bear touches her image briefly and crosses himself. I look at her and remember how she always invited me to come and talk to her, even without the Bear, and how I had always felt too shy to go. She spoke Friulano. The Bear says she spoke the old way, and that even he had difficulty following what she said. He would go to talk to her to learn, to practice this old language. As I look at the photo I am aware of a spark of pure joy? My spirit lifts, as though I have received a message from across time. 

“This is not the end,” I hear, “only the beginning of yet another journey.”