and i cant even reach out to your children, so many years have gone by, grown so far from your son, never really close to your daughter. i always felt the odd one out, always thought i saw a slight shift in their gaze when i opened my mouth and spoke to them truly, as i was, as i had thought they knew me to be, unencumbered. but at your wake and at your funeral i realized: we are never unencumbered, we are always uncomfortable and bothered and hindered, we are never quite right in our own skins.
your son, in fragments, told me of feeling your presence in a room so strongly that it frightened him out of his wits. he told me, watching the casket being closed was so difficult because it was truly the last time he would ever see you. out of nowhere between the plates of served food afterward, he whispered, how memories of you came and went in his mind, how he couldn’t grasp any one of them tightly enough to keep in focus.
all this in the face of your death, all this lost in a day of stoic grieving and formality. i never quite know what to make of these things, i never quite know what to make of myself, i never quite know how to be to fix it, any of it: his life, your death, my sense of obligation and detachment, or the odd place where it all sits awkwardly waiting to be resolved.