funeral
Yesterday I felt generally worse than the day before, generally felt extremely uncomfortable in my stomach and my head, very uncomfortable and tired. I think I was more resigned to his death and able to accept it, to allow it, except for the funeral.
Boyd would probably not have appreciated the funeral, though he would have the concern of people—all the friends who came, the relatives and friends there to help his parents.
The funeral was not for Boyd but for the people there.
The funeral was for the preacher, to advertize Christianity.
It was for the funeral home and the ritualistic, to make a pageant of it.
It was for the rest of us, and especially for Boyd's parents—to see the coffin containing his body lowered deep into the earth, and covered with shovel after shovel of heavy dirt. This meant it was true, he was dead, and now he was buried. It could not really be understood until it was seen.
The wind blew hard during the grave-site service—blew viciously at the tarpolin and at the flowers stood around the coffin, knocking some off, some over. Glory to the wind, for trying to express the anger and viciousness I felt. Back at the funeral home during the chapel service earlier I had wanted everything torn and knocked apart—all the flowers there be tumbled over, as if by hurricane. But the wind could not get inside the chapel.
And so they buried Boyd, and placed the flowers over the open dirt. I picked up a flower and tossed it on, to buck the neatness of the placed flowers—the only way I could state my protest.
I hated the neatness and order of the whole thing. I wanted chaos and confusion—because what I felt was chaos and confusion. I felt anarchy and disruption and viciousness against the neatness of it all.
They made his dying all neat and tidy and orderly: they perverted what really happened: they denied what I felt, and what more than anyone his parents felt; what, I think, all felt at least a little of.
It was a thing of destruction and violence, chaotic and confusing and bitter.
How I wanted to protest: Don't you know what you're doing? Don't you realize? Don't you realize who you're burying? What are you doing? What are you doing?
