Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

It seems like every family loss I’ve experienced turned out like that scene in the comedy Daytrippers, where two sisters clean out their deceased mother’s apartment and loudly bicker over who gets ownership of her TV and pain pills. Hilarious, but serious.

Grieving the death of a relative, or friend, is hard work. Work made even more difficult by the sudden and complex task of interring a body and its belongings. The living are thrust into the minutiae of funeral proceedings, caterers, florists, lawyers, movers, and estate professionals. All the while, hearts are heavy. Some people, by choice or pure necessity, abandon the task altogether.

Fortunately, on occasion, we have help. My thoughtful and fastidious friend Dana, is completing training to serve as an end-of-life doula. Another friend, Pam, sits bedside with hospice patients as a volunteer. She describes her work as existing in the “sacred territory of dying.” They both are empathetic and compassionate spirits.

Today’s intriguing poem illustrates the difficult task of processing those unreconciled feelings when laying the dead to rest. For many, that difficulty is tied up with having little time to grieve, or, with putting off the shock of loss, attendant to those painful memories.

elegy for the moaner, 2016
by Airea D. Matthews

After 22 years of gathering dust, it’s time
to remove the urn from the cabinet
& put him beneath proper ground.

There’s the small problem of not having
a pine box for the body made 
smaller by not having his body at all.

Hell, I don’t have a choir to sing riffs
and not one pastor to eulogize.
  I abandoned hat feathers and black
             church theatrics to settle on myrrh
kindling and mindful mantras.
  Although I concede: burials should be
an occasion of final rites, pomp
and happenstance, if you will,
with at least one moaner who may or may
  not know the departed. And so
I gather alone

with a shovel in my backyard
and his needle in my forethought.
I offer what I have to give—these brick pavers,
his cheap urn, the memory of my sister’s 
fist through our childhood home’s window
  and the gentle way he sobered to wrap 
her paw in an old shirt. The Barbie lunchbox
  in which he, high, captured the rabid
                bat that bit me while I slept.
Except it wasn’t a bat at all but a wren.
Imagine a grown man chasing a bird
just to say he finally caught the
elusive. Nevertheless, that bat spell took.
The bird flew. We fled. I lived.

We all lived for a while at least
until we didn’t. I am now miles
from where he spoke his last words:
                    Even God left. I’m only . . .
I get it. If the reaper RSVPs,
men wait at the forked road
                    with fresh baked chaff
grown over many summers—
bounty cut lovely, dross shot up.
Fool hands won’t realize Lucifer
   manages the silo, his barters larcenous.

I once loathed the blind risks
  that made men harvest pulse and 
bet full stalk. Laid odds against gains
             and harbored spite of ill gambles.
  But loss humbles, hindsight mellows,
since my double down with rage
             never once paid—

never one raised

                   my father from any grave.

"elegy for the moaner, 2016" by Airea D. Matthews. Used by permission of the poet.