Jasmine

It was cold that night. Hell it’s been cold all week. But that night it was cold and stormy. As if the sky cried just a little from watching the people cry a lot.

After someone dies there is a lot of standing around and a little sitting down. People don’t like to sit because it makes them feel like they are doing less even when no one is doing anything at all. Sitting is passive, standing is at least active. So they stand around a house or in the street waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Every once in a while someone who knew the deceased better than they did will pass and they’ll give them a hug and tell them how sorry they are and they will feel better about themselves because they got to do something more than standing and much more than sitting.

But it was cold that night and people filtered out of the street and into houses. They sat and they stood around the living rooms waiting for something to change.

The first change came when the police took the body away. It meant that they could go into the house now, the house of the deceased. But only close family went at first. The second change came. A car rolled up and out spilled more crying people and suddenly the standing people had something to do again.

Everyone bundled up and wandered through the house not wanting to touch things because they belonged to someone that was dead and they might mind. It was a mild form of chaos with people coming and going and coming again, and when it was over everyone left. Some left to be with their families. Others left to tell the story.

Everyone grieves differently but we have learned to treat them all the same. We pull on our sad eyes, maybe even leak a few tears. We take the bereaved into our arms and we tell them that the dead led a good life, that they were taken too soon, that they will be missed. This isn’t always the case but it is how we treat death.

Sometimes the person in question died after being in horrible pain for months on end. Their death is actually a blessing. Other times the dead were utter bastards while alive, a parasite on society. And sometimes the dead was a mother of four, a wife, a niece, a granddaughter. Not a perfect person, one who made a lot of mistakes and was just beginning to correct them. Sometimes the world doesn’t take them soon enough and sometimes it takes them too soon.