Blossom

“Do not stand by my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep.”

The starting lines from a well-known bereavement poem by Clare Harner, read by old Louis Wright up at the church pulpit. His left hand trembles around his wrinkled order of service while he reads off the rest of the poem, his right clenches and unclenches in his pant pocket.

Brilliant sun pours through stained glass windows, through transparent forms of handsome saints posed in prayer. Outside is a spring day too marvelous for words. The flowers deep coloured, a’bloom, a’burst; the long firs swaying at the edge of the lot. The fields are a vivid green after a night of intense downpour and at this time of morning, the heat warms a mist into rising.

“I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow.” Louis’s reedy voice forges through.

It’s not right. Everyone knows this. For him to be standing up there, reading words for a soul departed. For him to be holding back a gale of heartbreak. Even wide-eyed wild Molly Unders, six years old, clings to her mother in silence and stares toward the front of the church. Loud-mouthed Louise McLellan’s lips are a straight line, broken by the occasional wobble. The bungling bald barber twins from up High Street way sit in their own row, hands clasped, mustaches drooped.

It’s his grandchild, you see. There, in the closed cherry wood casket facing the congregation. There’s a photo of her on a glass table to one side.

Amelie.

“I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain.”

Her parents, her beautiful mother with straying grays in her long light hair and the fox-bearded farmer she fell in love with back in ’82, are inconsolable. Their grief, though silent, is such that it expands beyond them into the open air and pervades every space it finds. They are bent, stooped, on their knees, hanging over the pews by their elbows and clinging tightly to one another’s hand. They find themselves able to tear their eyes away from the casket. They are torn between the urge to look away, to run and hide, to burrow themselves away and forget, and yet – they must take in every single horrible, heart wrenching, impossible moment.

They cannot waste a second of time that they may regret, they must absorb every detail. Every moment she remains topside is one to be cherished.

Sunlight shimmies along the pews, dances tortuously with the breeze. The carefully pressed clothing of those gathered is dappled with the warmth of it. Rebecca Nifton of the grocery tenses as though struck by lightning. She shrinks away from it. It feels such a sin to embrace nature’s gifts during such a somber occasion. In the absence of delight, the light sometimes becomes just a colour.

“When you awaken in the morning’s hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night,” grates Louis Wright. The lines in his face, already quite carven, have been dug deeper still. No one wishes to outlive a generation they would have wished to long outlive them. Amelie was his pride and joy. Amelie was his angel.

It happened quickly. To say she suffered would have been a lie. Climbing the cherry tree had been her favourite pastime, a diversion from any and all troubles a six-year-old might have had. One minute she had been high in the sky; the next, a crumpled form fallen amidst the grass. She hadn’t made a sound. Her life had been brightly lived until, in a moment, extinguished from the world.

Who found her, no one could rightly remember. All they did know was that they’d rushed her to the hospital knowing full well that the end had already come. A mother clinging tightly to a body broken, a father sobbing at the wheel, a confused ginger-black terrier howling in the back seat.

They arrived at the hospital as four. They left as three.

Louis Wright finishes the poem. He folds the order of service and carefully puts it away. He takes one heaving breath and begins to leave the pulpit. He passes the priest, who is to take his place and begin the service, and the man presses a warm hand to his shoulder. He returns to his daughter and his son-in-law and kneels creakily to join them, furls his arms around them both.

The last line lingers in the air, in the flowered fragrance there. The branches outside tap merrily at the stained windows and the sun will not stop its beaming.

“Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.”