People expect funerals to be cinematic, like in movies. Dramatic, tense, and gray. Gray skies from which gray rain pours, gray tears cascading from an actress’s gray eyes. Here we have the grieving widow, the now fatherless daughter.

It’s beautiful. Melancholy. Picturesque. Wet.

Today, we were submerged.

Our skins were soaking up the sunlight like beach towels hung to dry in the salty sea wind. Though perhaps soaking wasn’t the right way to describe what my mother was doing.

Her flaxen hair and porcelain skin threw the sunlight back up to the sky. She was a pillar-mirror of reflection, a beam of brightness undaunted by the clothes that embalmed her torso, hips, thighs. She wore gray, not black. Not even a dark gray, like what I wore—the color so deep that only I could know of my secret rebellion against the uniform. I’d dared a small smile to myself as I dressed that morning.

But when I saw my mother, she made my already subliminal defiance seem corrective,
apologetic by comparison.

She wore gray, yes, a gray cashmere sweater-dress the color of the winter ocean. A gray so pale it was almost blue, or lilac, or what I imagined a soft sigh released at the end of a novel, or a finished cup of English Breakfast would look like. It was the gray of an April morning, misty meadows and dew-basted succulents.

It was so welcome a surprise on my part, that I nearly tore off my mourning gown in favor of a bright red pea coat and pants, but I knew that this day was not about me, and some pretense of blackened grief and despair, despite the history of this house, was imperative so as to not raise questioning eyebrows.

Now my mother wore on her face a careful mask of quiet acceptance.

But there wasn’t a single cloud in this November sky, and most of the snow had melted
away in the four days since we killed that wretched bastard. And we were exposed, the two of us, in a sea of black bodies with red, weeping faces, but it was all right because no one knew and no one considered to pause and take a glance.

I glanced. And my mother was glowing.

Toni Gentry