The Cherry Tree
I stood in front of the casket that held a person that once held so much life and happiness. One that just two days ago I had seen laughing. No more did it radiate joy. It was just a cold pale face that would soon be put in the ground. A certain emptiness had filled the yard. But it wasn’t a lightweight emptiness; if anything it was heavy. An emptiness that could drive a person crazy if stayed in for too long. An emptiness of just plain hopelessness.
Barely anyone uttered a word. Everyone knew what everyone else was thinking. There was no need to say it. Still it was maddening. It made you want to throw something at a wall just to make it stop.
But the worst...the worst was the man standing two people away from me. Who had just lost everything he had. The man who no one had ever seen cry breaking down in front of all of us. No one had anything to say. How do you tell someone everything is going to be ok when it’s not? How do you comfort someone when you have no clue what they're going through? You can’t. So people just looked at him as if he were a wounded animal. Which was probably an accurate depiction seeing as half his heart was inside that casket about to be buried six feet under the ground.
A gentle rain constantly tapped at my shoulders. The air was hard to breathe. I shuffled my feet away from the casket avoiding the rapidly growing puddles.
The preacher said a few words. None of us really listened. The casket creaked as it was lowered into the ground. Then a gentle thump as it hit the floor of the grave. Shovelful by shovelful I watched as she disappeared under the cover of mud. She had deserved a better end than this, just a cold dark casket in the middle of a bare field. She would’ve hated this. Too bland for her. A few hundred more fireworks here and it may have begun to suit her. Person by person the crowd thinned until it was just a few close relatives left. We waited until the final pile of dirt was shoveled on. My uncle trembled as he took ahold of sapling of a cherry tree, they had always been her favorite. Gently he planted the sapling next to the grave and packed on the dirt. A final symbol of what she was to all of us. A beautiful tree in the most barren of places. We said our last goodbyes and headed back into their small quiet farmhouse.
Every spring the tree flowers and is a constant reminder of who she was to all of us. The field is no longer barren. It is covered in flowers, grass, and newly growing trees. The memories grow dimmer, and begin to disappear. But that cherry tree will always remain.