Gray Day

The day of the funeral was eerie and gray, or maybe it was sunny and bright, but in my memory, it was eerie and gray.

I couldn't stop sobbing, the wall I had put up broke and it was the ugly kind of crying.  The kind where you suck in air and gulp for breath as the act of crying overtakes your body.  I distinctly remember my uncle, the man who had just lost the love of his life, turning to look at me with that, "its ok, we'll all be ok look."

We weren't ok though, none of us were ok.  We were collective in our grief, but I felt like I was on an island.  I didn't have the right to grieve so openly when this wonderful women had left three children behind.  I was not a motherless child, but I felt as lost as though I was.  My own mother was focused entirely on the babies health, on my grandparents, and I don't blame her for one second.

The day was miserable and never-ending.  All I wanted was to get away from the pain and at the same time all I wanted to do was be with those who shared my pain.

When it was all over, the boy came and got me.  He drove; I cried.  He was there when I needed him and as it turns out he had been there in the basement of the church grieving secondhand for a women he had only known a month.  He was there when they laid her in the ground and I turned my back because that couldn't be the last place I would ever see her.  He was there on the grayest of my days.