Still Flows the River

I stood not 3 feet from my Father’s naked coffin, closed. My mother sailed past, pale.
I asked her if she wished to view my father before the funeral guests arrived. She answered that she wouldn’t, and neither should I, the cask was as good as empty. She placed a wreath woven of barley, wheat and cotton atop the coffin. As I looked up from the hideous arrangement she pleaded that I ask her about it after the ceremony.

I trampled the run of carpet into the tea room behind the other guests. A relative I have never known commended me on my eulogy. I searched the room until I saw my mother sitting alone in the far corner, beckoning me to join her. I knew what she wanted me to ask. So I said ‘tell me about the wreath Mother’. And she spoke from afar….

‘As you know, in the days before your father died, I took him away from the hospice. He asked that he be taken away from the city, back to the place of his youth to end his days. I rented a farmhouse which overlooks the farm his family used to own, now long since abandoned.
He spent most of his time outside on the verandah; he said that inside he felt like the walls were touching him. Late at night he would sit in the largest room by the fire and I would serve him cheese and olives, what he could eat of them at least.
On the last night he took my hand and squeezed very tightly and said to me “Divinia, I can see that you are very worried, but I don’t want you to be because I am not. Tomorrow I want you to go down to the bottom of the hill, there is a small river there, waters have not flowed through it for many years. When I was a boy I used to take handfuls of seeds from my father’s crops and plant them along the bank. Would you go there tomorrow morning and pick some of them to make an arrangement with? You are happier when you are occupied”.
Early in the dawn I kissed him goodbye and walked down to the river – which was more of a dried up creek to an adult. I picked many kinds of grass and sat down to make an arrangement. I had stayed for many hours it seemed, when a brilliant blue water bird leapt up in front of me and cried like a child before flying out across the creek. I tried to follow the bird but it had disappeared. A cold breeze started to blow and a hundred smaller birds flew up into the heavens. That’s when I knew, I knew he was gone. I looked down into my hands at the wreath that I had woven when I had meant it to be a posy. I dropped to my knees on the bank to weep and I do not know if it was my tears or a miracle but the creek began to stream with swift, translucent water.
That is when I saw the young man, standing on the opposite bank. How similar you two look! He called to me “come with me Divinia, I am here now”. So I walked into that river, over to the other side. You see, we are together now, I just came to say goodbye.’

I have visited the river – it sits as dry as day – and the wreath sits upon my hall-stand as a shrine to my mother, and other things I will never comprehend.

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Tags:

afterlife, death, doppleganger, funeral, ghost, mourning, paranormal and wreath