In my third year of college, I’d moved home to a place where my parents could keep an eye on me. A place where I was expected to be less rebellious, waving my white flag and obeying all the rules. It was the ’70’s. It was Vietnam and Janis Joplin. I’d been a convent girl who’d grown up in uniforms and white oxfords, whose hair was never allowed to be freed from a slicked-back bun, artificial roses wrapped in a circle and pinned like a sign of infinity marking me in one space of time. Still, I managed to disrupt the rules that governed me, pushing against the boundaries of curfews and the strict laws of my home―like the afternoon I ate mushrooms with my best friend, then drove to work, and, in between the mayhem of maneuvering through traffic, became part of a funeral procession. A stream of headlights blurred in a chain of illuminated grief linking them together, except for me, a drifter caught in a row of mourning etiquette entangled in a movement beyond my control.
When I arrived at the cemetery, I had no tears to offer in my glass jar marked with the deceased’s name. So, I fell to my knees and prayed, and no one cared that I was a stranger high on psilocybin or a scofflaw abandoning commitments; I laid down near the casket beside the tombstone marked End of Watch. A policeman who’d been shot on duty buried next to a young girl. A gold tiara was placed over her marble headstone, the sun catching its crystal gems ricocheting back and forth through eucalyptus trees. I heard the priest reading psalms from the Bible. I watched his robe lift with the breeze in waves as if it was capturing God’s breath and releasing it again—words murmured in a chant-like cadence, a bittersweet lament, the scent of mint everywhere. Two deer were standing nearby. Their heads bent as if they were bowing out of respect for the dead. Tall grass surrounded them. One glanced up at me in what seemed an approving gesture or brief acknowledgment that I was there, his eyes full of such kindness it made me cry.
Grey Sparrow Journal 