Eulogy

When my Meemaw Passed, 

I spent the week in my room spinning and sobbing

singing a sad song I had always loved from the radio. 

Hoping the words and my dizzyness would replace the peach pit

that I had somehow swallowed. 

When My Mother died, 

I slumpt against the doorframe of our kitchen

and wailed like the toddler I no longer am. 

At the funeral I didn't feel sad enough

because I had greived for her for years. 

She had been long gone before she ever left. 

Somethings I think 

about the way

my grandma said to never fall asleep in the bathtub

otherwise you'd drown

in a clawfoot tub that meant more to her as superstition and a bookshelf

then it ever did as a bath. 

I would think about the way that my mother would climb to the top of the walnut tree. 

Climbing up a fractal of leaves and branches 

and wave at the jets flying by

a panicked call from the controller

as my mother laughed with glee, more braver then I've ever been. 

When my Boppa died, I felt nothing

but a suckerpunch in the gut. 

God was in the room on his deathbed. 

I prayed to him as we sat in the parking lot of the hospital. 

That was the vigil I sat months before he died a cured man.

His corpulance hollowed form disease. 

When My Aunt Becky Died. 

It was after a week and a half of me not visiting here. 

Because her Hospice was in the living room 

that I spent so many days of my childhood. 

I couldn't stand the slow crawl torwards death. 

as she no longer remembered anything but pain. 

I don't remember much about my grandfather anymore,

Hes wrapped up in the fabric of my childhood. 

Replaced with a tapestry made of the concept of family and history. 

I remember sitting on his lap 

and his grey crew t-shirt that still sits in my closet. which has always been to big for my frame. 

I don't walk past my Aunt's House anymore

I no longer walk in the front door without knocking. 

I think about how every time she went to the store

she would buy me a package of coconut butter cookies

but in my adulthood they taste like nothing. 

When my Aunt Krystal Died,

I hadn't called for months 

At the funeral I met distant cousins

One last gift of geneology. 

She was buried in the same cemetary as my grandparents and her husband who I had never met. 

She will be there when ever there is fruit to harvest

whenever I smell smoke like her old wood stove

and as the condos build over the bones of her house

I will think about the ways. 

that like the way the last women of our family from the old country,

our past is loved, lost, and forgotten.