Manners For The Dead

Not so long ago,

I was summoned to make people laugh.

It wasn't the first time.

By then,

making people laugh was almost a habit.

But it was the first time

I'd been summoned to palliative care.

Palliative care.

Such a polite phrase for a place 

where death has already entered the room.

We want to say "dying" or "at the brink of death" but that's rude, we have been taught, 

so we say, "terminally ill", 

as though the person were waiting at a bus terminus,

ticket in hand,

headed somewhere we've agreed not to name.

Apparently,

a good laugh is the best foot forward

when easing into conversations about death.

I've always found that

both outrageously ridiculous and abrasively deluded.

How do you make conversation

about the one thing

you've spent your entire life learning not to look at?

I lost my father's father when I was ten, and he was eighty.

I didn't know him well enough to cry.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching other people wail and lament,

then pinching yourself

into trying to produce tears,

the appropriate evidence,

only to find

your eyes paralysed dry?

I lost my mother's mother when I was seventeen.

I needed to be strong

so my mother wouldn't have to be.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching someone thin themselves 

from breath to deathbed to ashes,

and feeling nothing that looked sufficiently like grief?

Just this vast grassland of tamed void.

When I was thirteen,

I held a hen by the throat while it was beheaded.

Warm blood gushed over my hand and fingers,

steaming into the winter air

before clotting across my palm.

I told myself

this must be how dinners felt to cavemen.

I was just a boy,

temporarily frozen in a time

my father's father, or his father, couldn't remember.

Perhaps that 

was the first thing I learned about death:

when something becomes too difficult to feel,

the mind gives it a story instead.

I've watched people die.

I've heard people die.

I've watched things animate and inanimate, die.

I've heard things wise and otherwise, die too.

And every time, I've wondered

where the feeling was.

Not because I didn't know

what I was supposed to feel.

Because I did.

There are manners for the dead.

You cry.

You lower your voice.

You remember the good things.

You stand beside the corpse

and behave as though

grief were a language

everyone was born speaking.

I have always been bad at the language.

So I questioned my manners.

I have tried killing myself.

Not once.

Not twice.

Three times.

I remember very little.

Except the scars.

They remember more than I do.

I've watched people go awfully silent

on learning someone has lost

a parent,

a spouse,

a friend,

a family,

an animal

they called a pet.

I've watched people apologise to the grieving.

I've often wondered, 

is it on behalf of the dead,

or the bereaved?

Death is very good at leaving people without verbs.

We say sorry.

We say take care.

We say they're in a better place.

We say anything

that keeps the corpse

from becoming

the only honest thing in the room.

A wise man who studied minds for a living and loving

once told me, 

I am a graveyard

of the many corpses

I've had wither away beneath my blood and bones.

I've thought about that more than I care to admit.

Because graveyards don't cry.

They don't scream.

They don't ask why someone had to die.

They only keep what is left.

And perhaps that is what I've been doing all these years.

Keeping.

The grandfather.

The grandmother.

The hen.

The strangers.

The people who became memories before I learned what to call them.

Every death leaves something behind.

Sometimes a photograph.

Sometimes a scar.

Sometimes a sentence someone keeps repeating

because repetition is the closest thing we have to resurrection.

And sometimes, apparently, it leaves a ghost.

So every time I see or hear of death now,

I don't wonder whether I can feel it.

I wonder whether the dead can see the ghosts I house.