Pale Horse Coming [Original Fiction]
Note: this is based around my own feelings and reactions to my mothers death though names have been changes and detail tweaked. There is a lot of truth in it, but it is fiction. Written for my creative writing class.
I Saw a Pale Horse Coming
I sat up, heart pounding and blinking in the light that flooded my room from the stairway light. I left it on still even though my father told me that eighteen is too old to be afraid of the dark. I was aware that it was childish, but my over-active imagination still mad monsters out of the common nighttime noises. It was after midnight, well into the witching hour and I knew that no one else in the house was awake though how they could sleep through the night with death circling over head like a hawk I couldn’t understand. I slipped out of bed, my floor bare and clean, a far cry from its usual chaos of papers and random trinkets that used to blanket the floor and it seemed to reflect my own state of not being myself. I had cleaned it a week ago, boxing up all my old toys and clothes to be moved to the attic above the garage and setting aside the things that would be going to the dorm with me in a few short weeks. I think I knew, even then, that I would never again be able to live in that house.
I crept over to the stairwell, avoiding the creaky floor boards with the ease of eighteen years worth of experience and headed down the stairs. I stopped half way down, sitting and staring at the hospital bed set up at the bottom only a few scant feet into our dining room. I watched my refection out of the corner of my eye in the glass of the pictures that marched up the wall in a steady procession. A slim, coltish teenager with long, dark hair gazed back at me with tears in her too-large green eyes. She was easier to watch than the figure in the hospital bed below.
I didn’t have to look at the person lying in it to know what she looked like; short brown hair soaked with sweat, loving dark eyes that had not opened in days, and a once plump frame that was little more than skin stretched over brittle bones. I listened to the gasping breaths in clinical sort of silence, hiccupping reflex actions of dying lungs in a vain attempt at functioning. It was a sound that I had woken to each night for the past two weeks, both hoping for and dreading their absence.
I don’t know why I knew that that night was different only that it was, somehow. Nothing had changed since the last three nights I had slithered out of my bed to creep down the stairs and look out at the indistinct form of my aunt asleep on the couch and the darkened visage of the living room that could be seen from my vantage point. Except, I could still tell something was off. There was a feeling whispering in my soul that was telling me that it was almost time. That after two months of painful agony, the end was almost here. I wasn’t afraid, not yet, but I felt myself trembling none the less.
I moved the rest of the way downstairs, still so silent that I wondered if I would forget how to make noise, and came to stand next to the hospital bed. I didn’t know what to do, what the way I was supposed to react to this situation was, so I just stood there in the darkened room. It was late July and the air moved hot and muggy in from the open windows. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I had gotten a job working with horses at a summer camp and I was supposed to have spent to summer dusty and up to my elbows in kids and manure. I had been so excited to work at the camp that I had loved as a little girl, especially since I got to work with horses which was something I enjoyed immensely and having to turn it down at the last minute had twisted something inside me. It had caused me to slam a door shut on a future that I didn’t fully understand. I don’t ride horses much anymore. For some reason it hurts too much.
It was still hard to reconcile the sickly, wraith-like person in front of me with my kind, energetic mother. It couldn’t possibly be the same person who had read to me as a child, who just a few short months ago had scolded me for ditching class with my boyfriend. I had watched the decline, looked on as the cancer slowly took over her body but I couldn’t really believe she was going to leave me behind. She’d fought this fight twice before and won, if only for a short time, she should have been able to lick it a once more. Third time’s the charm after all. Though, as much as I hadn’t wanted to believe it, screamed at the thought of her being gone, I was the first one to realize that she wasn’t going to make it this time.
My mother had been the center of my life for as far back as I could remember. I had never needed to wonder if my parents really wanted me as my best friend Holly so often had. I was adopted and I had learned enough about the process at an early age to know that you didn’t go through putting your life under a microscope like that unless you really, really wanted a child. My mother and I had always been close, much closer than any of my friends were with their parents. As an elementary school teacher the first thing my mom taught me was how to appreciate books. She used to read to me every night and as I got older and my grasp of the English language solidified I began to read out loud to her. As I got older that time occurred less and less until the cancer had finally left her bed ridden. I then spent most of the summer after high school propped up next to her in bed and reading whatever book had engaged my interest at that moment, sliding back into that routine as if I had never left it. I had grown up in the country far out of town and a good distance from even my closest friends, not that I had many in my shy early years so it was of little surprise to any who knew me that my mother and I remained close. I was a shy, socially awkward girl who was the perfect target for bullies. I was a daydreamer and a teacher’s pet and there were times when I felt that my mother was the only one who would ever accept me for who I was. Even Father had told me plenty of times to grow up and pull my head out of the clouds that I lived in the real world and staying lost in my daydreams and books wouldn’t help me get ahead in life. I had very little interest in real life then because it hadn’t really offered a lot to me other then bullies and tears. I forgive him for saying things like that eventually, he was an engineer and his mind revolved around the practical, but he never got me my like mom did.
I stood there next to that metal bed frame that was slowly turning my home into a morgue, half fearful to touch her, and wondered if it would be any easier to let go if I did not. I watch her quietly for long moments, wrapping myself in that safe bubble of silence I’d perfected over the years as the memories of my caring vivacious mother overlaid themselves with the dying woman in the hospital bed. The breaths were stuttering by then in a way they hadn’t before and I quickly headed over to the couch to wake my aunt when I realized that she was failing. She was a nurse, she would know what to do. I dared not wake my father; I wasn’t strong enough to be the one to tell him that she would be dead soon. I it would be days before I could meet his eyes again and weeks before I spoke words to him with more than one syllable.
“Auntie,” I called softly, though my whisper still seemed unnaturally loud to me in the sharp silence of the wee hours. She did not wake at the soft sound and I had to remind myself that not everyone was as easily woken as I was. I touched her shoulder, my skin rebelling at the contact and gave her a gentle shake. “Auntie, wake up,” I said again.
She sat up and turned her head to blink blearily at me, “Jessie?”
I bit at my lip in a nervous habit, my dark hair falling forwards and concealing my tear-streaked face. I hated it when people saw me cry. “I think you should go get Dad,” I whispered. “I think it’s time.” It physically hurt to say the words out loud.
She slowly stood and walked around me to the hospital bed. She checked my mother’s pulse and respirations with a steady professional hand her years as a nurse obvious even in the dim light coming from my stairwell. She looked up at me after a long moment with teary eyes and my suspicions were confirmed. She held her arms out to me for a hug, trying to offer me comfort. I remained by the couch, watching.
“I’ll go wake your father,” she said seeming to understand when I made no move to enter her embrace that I couldn’t.
I just nodded, trying to breathe around the lump of pain in my chest that seemed to keep my lungs from expanding. I moved to the bed again when she disappeared into the master bedroom to wake my father and gently kissed the cool forehead. She had hung on to life far longer then she needed to, I knew, and I felt guilty about it because she was terrified of leaving me behind. I had told her that it was alright, that I knew she wasn’t trying to abandon me and that I would be okay, but I don’t know if she believed me or even heard by then as she drifted in and out of awareness. I felt my dad come up behind me and I retreated to stand next to the couch once again. I didn’t want him to touch me; I didn’t want anyone to touch me ever again at that moment. I think the physical sensations would have made it too-real for me. I claimed my favorite perch on the arm of the couch and watched him and my aunt say their goodbyes to a sister and a wife. I did not go near the bed again. I couldn’t. The stuttering gasps became shallower and I realized that the end was close. All the months of preparation, of telling myself that it would be okay, that she shouldn’t have to suffer anymore, vanished in that instant. I was a scared child and I just wanted my mother to hold me safe against her once more. I wanted to scream out loud as the terror of being alone gripped me, but I could not make a sound. In my mind I shrieked all the words that I couldn’t seem to form.
“Don’t go! Don’t Go! I lied; I’m not ready to let you go. Don’t go, Mommy, I lied. Please don’t leave me! Mommy!”
But no amount of words or medicine could reverse the outcome of the cancer’s war on her body.
I was frozen; watching in slow motion as her breathing stuttered and died; watching as my whole world died. I couldn’t move or make a sound, not even to reach up and wipe at the silent tears that traced their way down my face in a constant stream. I could hear Dad crying and saw Auntie pick up the phone to call our next-door-neighbor who was our hospice nurse, but was like watching something through a tunnel, like it was happening to someone else. Time ceased to make sense to me, for months, at that moment and I couldn’t tell if it took hours or seconds for the hospice nurse, Francis, to arrive. She was a short, round older lady who had given and my bath products every Christmas since I turned thirteen and been our closest neighbor since well before my parents brought me home. She confirmed time of death and set about making the appropriate calls to the funeral home. I paid her no real attention, just stared off into space trying to get back into that nice safe bubble of silence. I didn’t move. I had vague memories of people asking me if I was okay but I couldn’t remember what I said or even if I answered them. I just wanted them gone. Eventually they left me alone, just sitting on the arm of the couch as silent sobs racked my body. I don’t remember dawn arriving, just somehow the darkness of night was replaced by the lead-grey of morning, and with the sun came the gentlemen from the funeral home.
I watched them for a moment, faceless men in pale grey suits moving around my dining room, still stuck in that frozen limbo, until one lifted my mother’s head up off the pillow to adjust something. Her head lolled back like a rag doll on her limp neck and I bolted out through the kitchen and onto the porch, choking on the noise that nearly clawed its way out of my throat. I stood on the front porch trying not to relive the sight of the lifeless body that truly couldn’t be anything other than dead. Up until that point I could still half-delude myself into not thinking about it. She looked just like she was asleep; still and calm but ultimately a human being. Now there could be no more mistaking that thing for anything other than an empty husk of what had once been the person I’d loved most in the whole world. They brought her body out of the house right past me but I did not look at them. I kept my arms wrapped tight around my body, hands tucked into the sleeves of my terry-cloth robe, and stared off at some point in the distance where all I could see were trees and sky and nothing that could remind me of the painful tragedy that was unfolding around me. Silence finally descended in my head, and in my heart.
The next few days were mostly a blur of phone calls and condolences, I spoke when spoken to, short robotic sentences, but everyone was too concerned with their own grief to worry about me. As long as I wasn‘t crying and didn’t appear to be breaking down they didn‘t have to actively worry about me too. And I hadn’t cried since. I was numb; the tearing sobs of that night were long since absent and I sank deeper into that silent bubble in my head. I was a mechanical puppet that spoke all the right words and made the right gestures but I couldn’t really feel emotion anymore. I couldn’t even remember how a human was supposed to feel. All I understood was silence and emptiness.
The funeral was the typical catholic affair that my mother had wanted. About the only thing we had ever fought about was religion. She was a lifelong catholic and I had declaired myself agnostic about as soon I had figured out what the word meant. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God, or some higher power it was that I didn’t really hold with any of the dogma that seemed to be the foundations of most religions. If I was going to believe in a higher being I was going to do it in my own way. I hated going to church and my mother and I had gone rounds when I told her I refused to be confirmed. She eventually agreed, for all her faith my mother had never been one to try and restrict me. I didn’t mind the funeral because it had been important to her and whatever my views on religion were churches always made me feel a little peaceful. As long as some boring old priest wasn’t drooling a sermon out over the lectern that was. I was seated in the front of the rows of hard, wooden pews with the rest of my family. I remember the abundance of flowers, lilies mostly though there were some of the soft pink roses my mother had loved. I don’t know who arranged that but I wanted to thank them. The sounds of the baptismal fountain had always distracted my from the mind numbing litany of the gospel on church days before and it served the same purpose then. I can’t remember who exactly sat next to me as the funeral progressed, it wasn’t my father of that I was certain. It may have been my aunt or my grandma but I was never completely sure. It was kind of funny that a girl who had always kept one eye on her surroundings to watch for bullies could be so completely unaware of her environment.
I was prepared to speak at the funeral, at the suggestion of my aunt, but I couldn’t really see how anything I could say would make sense of this situation to the people gathered there. The priest gave my introduction and I walked up to the podium at the front of the church with a piece of grey paper clutched in my hand. The church was full of people whose lives had been touched by my mother, teachers and families of her students, a testament to the great person she was, but it was just a mob of nameless faces to me then. I stood in front of them, my usual shyness and stage fright frozen under the numbing ice on my heart, and spoke.
“I wrote this for my mother,” I said clearly, my voice echoing across expansive room. “She was my world and I will miss her more than anything.”
The words sounded trite to me, as if nothing that I could say would ever properly explain the agony of that moment of loss. There was no way to explain what it’s like to wake in the night and know that Death on his pale horse had ridden into your home and taken away the one person who has loved me forever, who had put me before everyone else on the whole planet. I couldn’t explain what it felt like to miss someone so badly that I could no longer stand to feel anything for fear that the grief itself would simply tear my body apart from the inside.
I was standing on a pedestal
A King before the crowd
My future strong before me
At last I could stand proud.
Battles that had been fought before
Didn’t worry me none.
We had faced the same foe
And each time we had won.
At last it seemed that everything
Was finally going my way
But my heart heard the whispers
That no one else would say.
Oh that broken afternoon
As my world tumbled down
A King before the people
With no one else around.
I stared there into nothing
In the shadow of the day
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I am standing in a cellar
Barred window to the sky
Holding a memory rusted
By all the tears I cry.
I hear the whispers of a world
That only the end can see,
As my mind is screaming
“please don’t leave me!”
But I was a king on a pedestal
My strength I had found
And I know I can find my way
Without her around
Oh that broken afternoon
As my world tumbled down
A king before the people
With no one else around.
I stared there into nothing
In the shadows of the day
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I faced the gathered mourners with dry eyes and an empty heart as I read what I had written, a poem scratched out when I had first realized that she would be lost to me before I had realized just how hard her being gone would be. It had a far more hopeful end then I could envision then. Everyone cried as I finished, except for me. I looked at them all with dead eyes and a blank expression. It felt like my funeral too.
I Saw a Pale Horse Coming
I sat up, heart pounding and blinking in the light that flooded my room from the stairway light. I left it on still even though my father told me that eighteen is too old to be afraid of the dark. I was aware that it was childish, but my over-active imagination still mad monsters out of the common nighttime noises. It was after midnight, well into the witching hour and I knew that no one else in the house was awake though how they could sleep through the night with death circling over head like a hawk I couldn’t understand. I slipped out of bed, my floor bare and clean, a far cry from its usual chaos of papers and random trinkets that used to blanket the floor and it seemed to reflect my own state of not being myself. I had cleaned it a week ago, boxing up all my old toys and clothes to be moved to the attic above the garage and setting aside the things that would be going to the dorm with me in a few short weeks. I think I knew, even then, that I would never again be able to live in that house.
I crept over to the stairwell, avoiding the creaky floor boards with the ease of eighteen years worth of experience and headed down the stairs. I stopped half way down, sitting and staring at the hospital bed set up at the bottom only a few scant feet into our dining room. I watched my refection out of the corner of my eye in the glass of the pictures that marched up the wall in a steady procession. A slim, coltish teenager with long, dark hair gazed back at me with tears in her too-large green eyes. She was easier to watch than the figure in the hospital bed below.
I didn’t have to look at the person lying in it to know what she looked like; short brown hair soaked with sweat, loving dark eyes that had not opened in days, and a once plump frame that was little more than skin stretched over brittle bones. I listened to the gasping breaths in clinical sort of silence, hiccupping reflex actions of dying lungs in a vain attempt at functioning. It was a sound that I had woken to each night for the past two weeks, both hoping for and dreading their absence.
I don’t know why I knew that that night was different only that it was, somehow. Nothing had changed since the last three nights I had slithered out of my bed to creep down the stairs and look out at the indistinct form of my aunt asleep on the couch and the darkened visage of the living room that could be seen from my vantage point. Except, I could still tell something was off. There was a feeling whispering in my soul that was telling me that it was almost time. That after two months of painful agony, the end was almost here. I wasn’t afraid, not yet, but I felt myself trembling none the less.
I moved the rest of the way downstairs, still so silent that I wondered if I would forget how to make noise, and came to stand next to the hospital bed. I didn’t know what to do, what the way I was supposed to react to this situation was, so I just stood there in the darkened room. It was late July and the air moved hot and muggy in from the open windows. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I had gotten a job working with horses at a summer camp and I was supposed to have spent to summer dusty and up to my elbows in kids and manure. I had been so excited to work at the camp that I had loved as a little girl, especially since I got to work with horses which was something I enjoyed immensely and having to turn it down at the last minute had twisted something inside me. It had caused me to slam a door shut on a future that I didn’t fully understand. I don’t ride horses much anymore. For some reason it hurts too much.
It was still hard to reconcile the sickly, wraith-like person in front of me with my kind, energetic mother. It couldn’t possibly be the same person who had read to me as a child, who just a few short months ago had scolded me for ditching class with my boyfriend. I had watched the decline, looked on as the cancer slowly took over her body but I couldn’t really believe she was going to leave me behind. She’d fought this fight twice before and won, if only for a short time, she should have been able to lick it a once more. Third time’s the charm after all. Though, as much as I hadn’t wanted to believe it, screamed at the thought of her being gone, I was the first one to realize that she wasn’t going to make it this time.
My mother had been the center of my life for as far back as I could remember. I had never needed to wonder if my parents really wanted me as my best friend Holly so often had. I was adopted and I had learned enough about the process at an early age to know that you didn’t go through putting your life under a microscope like that unless you really, really wanted a child. My mother and I had always been close, much closer than any of my friends were with their parents. As an elementary school teacher the first thing my mom taught me was how to appreciate books. She used to read to me every night and as I got older and my grasp of the English language solidified I began to read out loud to her. As I got older that time occurred less and less until the cancer had finally left her bed ridden. I then spent most of the summer after high school propped up next to her in bed and reading whatever book had engaged my interest at that moment, sliding back into that routine as if I had never left it. I had grown up in the country far out of town and a good distance from even my closest friends, not that I had many in my shy early years so it was of little surprise to any who knew me that my mother and I remained close. I was a shy, socially awkward girl who was the perfect target for bullies. I was a daydreamer and a teacher’s pet and there were times when I felt that my mother was the only one who would ever accept me for who I was. Even Father had told me plenty of times to grow up and pull my head out of the clouds that I lived in the real world and staying lost in my daydreams and books wouldn’t help me get ahead in life. I had very little interest in real life then because it hadn’t really offered a lot to me other then bullies and tears. I forgive him for saying things like that eventually, he was an engineer and his mind revolved around the practical, but he never got me my like mom did.
I stood there next to that metal bed frame that was slowly turning my home into a morgue, half fearful to touch her, and wondered if it would be any easier to let go if I did not. I watch her quietly for long moments, wrapping myself in that safe bubble of silence I’d perfected over the years as the memories of my caring vivacious mother overlaid themselves with the dying woman in the hospital bed. The breaths were stuttering by then in a way they hadn’t before and I quickly headed over to the couch to wake my aunt when I realized that she was failing. She was a nurse, she would know what to do. I dared not wake my father; I wasn’t strong enough to be the one to tell him that she would be dead soon. I it would be days before I could meet his eyes again and weeks before I spoke words to him with more than one syllable.
“Auntie,” I called softly, though my whisper still seemed unnaturally loud to me in the sharp silence of the wee hours. She did not wake at the soft sound and I had to remind myself that not everyone was as easily woken as I was. I touched her shoulder, my skin rebelling at the contact and gave her a gentle shake. “Auntie, wake up,” I said again.
She sat up and turned her head to blink blearily at me, “Jessie?”
I bit at my lip in a nervous habit, my dark hair falling forwards and concealing my tear-streaked face. I hated it when people saw me cry. “I think you should go get Dad,” I whispered. “I think it’s time.” It physically hurt to say the words out loud.
She slowly stood and walked around me to the hospital bed. She checked my mother’s pulse and respirations with a steady professional hand her years as a nurse obvious even in the dim light coming from my stairwell. She looked up at me after a long moment with teary eyes and my suspicions were confirmed. She held her arms out to me for a hug, trying to offer me comfort. I remained by the couch, watching.
“I’ll go wake your father,” she said seeming to understand when I made no move to enter her embrace that I couldn’t.
I just nodded, trying to breathe around the lump of pain in my chest that seemed to keep my lungs from expanding. I moved to the bed again when she disappeared into the master bedroom to wake my father and gently kissed the cool forehead. She had hung on to life far longer then she needed to, I knew, and I felt guilty about it because she was terrified of leaving me behind. I had told her that it was alright, that I knew she wasn’t trying to abandon me and that I would be okay, but I don’t know if she believed me or even heard by then as she drifted in and out of awareness. I felt my dad come up behind me and I retreated to stand next to the couch once again. I didn’t want him to touch me; I didn’t want anyone to touch me ever again at that moment. I think the physical sensations would have made it too-real for me. I claimed my favorite perch on the arm of the couch and watched him and my aunt say their goodbyes to a sister and a wife. I did not go near the bed again. I couldn’t. The stuttering gasps became shallower and I realized that the end was close. All the months of preparation, of telling myself that it would be okay, that she shouldn’t have to suffer anymore, vanished in that instant. I was a scared child and I just wanted my mother to hold me safe against her once more. I wanted to scream out loud as the terror of being alone gripped me, but I could not make a sound. In my mind I shrieked all the words that I couldn’t seem to form.
“Don’t go! Don’t Go! I lied; I’m not ready to let you go. Don’t go, Mommy, I lied. Please don’t leave me! Mommy!”
But no amount of words or medicine could reverse the outcome of the cancer’s war on her body.
I was frozen; watching in slow motion as her breathing stuttered and died; watching as my whole world died. I couldn’t move or make a sound, not even to reach up and wipe at the silent tears that traced their way down my face in a constant stream. I could hear Dad crying and saw Auntie pick up the phone to call our next-door-neighbor who was our hospice nurse, but was like watching something through a tunnel, like it was happening to someone else. Time ceased to make sense to me, for months, at that moment and I couldn’t tell if it took hours or seconds for the hospice nurse, Francis, to arrive. She was a short, round older lady who had given and my bath products every Christmas since I turned thirteen and been our closest neighbor since well before my parents brought me home. She confirmed time of death and set about making the appropriate calls to the funeral home. I paid her no real attention, just stared off into space trying to get back into that nice safe bubble of silence. I didn’t move. I had vague memories of people asking me if I was okay but I couldn’t remember what I said or even if I answered them. I just wanted them gone. Eventually they left me alone, just sitting on the arm of the couch as silent sobs racked my body. I don’t remember dawn arriving, just somehow the darkness of night was replaced by the lead-grey of morning, and with the sun came the gentlemen from the funeral home.
I watched them for a moment, faceless men in pale grey suits moving around my dining room, still stuck in that frozen limbo, until one lifted my mother’s head up off the pillow to adjust something. Her head lolled back like a rag doll on her limp neck and I bolted out through the kitchen and onto the porch, choking on the noise that nearly clawed its way out of my throat. I stood on the front porch trying not to relive the sight of the lifeless body that truly couldn’t be anything other than dead. Up until that point I could still half-delude myself into not thinking about it. She looked just like she was asleep; still and calm but ultimately a human being. Now there could be no more mistaking that thing for anything other than an empty husk of what had once been the person I’d loved most in the whole world. They brought her body out of the house right past me but I did not look at them. I kept my arms wrapped tight around my body, hands tucked into the sleeves of my terry-cloth robe, and stared off at some point in the distance where all I could see were trees and sky and nothing that could remind me of the painful tragedy that was unfolding around me. Silence finally descended in my head, and in my heart.
The next few days were mostly a blur of phone calls and condolences, I spoke when spoken to, short robotic sentences, but everyone was too concerned with their own grief to worry about me. As long as I wasn‘t crying and didn’t appear to be breaking down they didn‘t have to actively worry about me too. And I hadn’t cried since. I was numb; the tearing sobs of that night were long since absent and I sank deeper into that silent bubble in my head. I was a mechanical puppet that spoke all the right words and made the right gestures but I couldn’t really feel emotion anymore. I couldn’t even remember how a human was supposed to feel. All I understood was silence and emptiness.
The funeral was the typical catholic affair that my mother had wanted. About the only thing we had ever fought about was religion. She was a lifelong catholic and I had declaired myself agnostic about as soon I had figured out what the word meant. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God, or some higher power it was that I didn’t really hold with any of the dogma that seemed to be the foundations of most religions. If I was going to believe in a higher being I was going to do it in my own way. I hated going to church and my mother and I had gone rounds when I told her I refused to be confirmed. She eventually agreed, for all her faith my mother had never been one to try and restrict me. I didn’t mind the funeral because it had been important to her and whatever my views on religion were churches always made me feel a little peaceful. As long as some boring old priest wasn’t drooling a sermon out over the lectern that was. I was seated in the front of the rows of hard, wooden pews with the rest of my family. I remember the abundance of flowers, lilies mostly though there were some of the soft pink roses my mother had loved. I don’t know who arranged that but I wanted to thank them. The sounds of the baptismal fountain had always distracted my from the mind numbing litany of the gospel on church days before and it served the same purpose then. I can’t remember who exactly sat next to me as the funeral progressed, it wasn’t my father of that I was certain. It may have been my aunt or my grandma but I was never completely sure. It was kind of funny that a girl who had always kept one eye on her surroundings to watch for bullies could be so completely unaware of her environment.
I was prepared to speak at the funeral, at the suggestion of my aunt, but I couldn’t really see how anything I could say would make sense of this situation to the people gathered there. The priest gave my introduction and I walked up to the podium at the front of the church with a piece of grey paper clutched in my hand. The church was full of people whose lives had been touched by my mother, teachers and families of her students, a testament to the great person she was, but it was just a mob of nameless faces to me then. I stood in front of them, my usual shyness and stage fright frozen under the numbing ice on my heart, and spoke.
“I wrote this for my mother,” I said clearly, my voice echoing across expansive room. “She was my world and I will miss her more than anything.”
The words sounded trite to me, as if nothing that I could say would ever properly explain the agony of that moment of loss. There was no way to explain what it’s like to wake in the night and know that Death on his pale horse had ridden into your home and taken away the one person who has loved me forever, who had put me before everyone else on the whole planet. I couldn’t explain what it felt like to miss someone so badly that I could no longer stand to feel anything for fear that the grief itself would simply tear my body apart from the inside.
I was standing on a pedestal
A King before the crowd
My future strong before me
At last I could stand proud.
Battles that had been fought before
Didn’t worry me none.
We had faced the same foe
And each time we had won.
At last it seemed that everything
Was finally going my way
But my heart heard the whispers
That no one else would say.
Oh that broken afternoon
As my world tumbled down
A King before the people
With no one else around.
I stared there into nothing
In the shadow of the day
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I am standing in a cellar
Barred window to the sky
Holding a memory rusted
By all the tears I cry.
I hear the whispers of a world
That only the end can see,
As my mind is screaming
“please don’t leave me!”
But I was a king on a pedestal
My strength I had found
And I know I can find my way
Without her around
Oh that broken afternoon
As my world tumbled down
A king before the people
With no one else around.
I stared there into nothing
In the shadows of the day
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I saw a pale horse coming
To take a soul away.
I faced the gathered mourners with dry eyes and an empty heart as I read what I had written, a poem scratched out when I had first realized that she would be lost to me before I had realized just how hard her being gone would be. It had a far more hopeful end then I could envision then. Everyone cried as I finished, except for me. I looked at them all with dead eyes and a blank expression. It felt like my funeral too.