Mary was dead; that much was certain. There would have been nothing remarkable about what happened afterward if that terrible statement were not true. Mary Ohlman, my friend and onetime love, was dead, killed in an automobile accident, and I had come to say good-bye to her on a hard, gray February morning.
I sat in the back of a tiny, wooden church that groaned and creaked with the shifting of the crowd like a ship in a heavy sea. We were listening to the words of an aged priest who, for once, had actually known the person whose life he was summing up. Mary had been a person worth knowing, and the priest struggled to convey that. But instead of isolating the one thing that had made her special, he piled up clichés in an improbable, impersonal monument. She was a giving person. She never met a stranger. She had a smile for everyone. I became impatient with this and began to word my own silent rebuttal. She was good, I wanted to tell the dark, bent gathering. That was the rare, unlikely fact of it. Yes, she was a strong friend, a good mother, a loving wife. She was accomplished and gifted and bright. But what we were missing now was something more than all those things and something simpler. She was good, and she expected goodness from the people she met, a ridiculous long shot that always seemed to come in for her. She believed that the world around her had goodness as its basis and its underlying truth. She’d died believing that, an uncommon feat.
In the end, the priest succeeded without my help and in spite of himself. His own obvious grief and confusion conveyed a meaning too heavy for his words to bear.
I took my place at the end of Mary’s funeral procession, conscious of my grandmother’s superstition that the last in line would be the next to die. It was a long line of cars, out of all proportion to the short distance to be covered. Mary was halfway to her grave before my tired wheels had begun to roll. The cemetery was on a hillside exposed to the winter wind. Many of the mourners stayed in their cars, and the group by the open grave crowded tightly together. I was in no mood for even that small interaction. I walked up the hill above the gathering and watched from the thin shadow of a cedar tree and the company of older, quieter graves.
The old priest was speaking again, but his words were whipped away by the same north wind that tore at his vestments. I supplied my own text. My theme was “she is gone.” During her funeral mass and now as I watched the priest sprinkling holy water on the wind, I was struck by the contradiction between the stated message of the service and its hidden lesson. For while the words conveyed the Christian consolation that Mary lived on, that she was now in a better world where we would someday join her, the service seemed designed to help us accept the opposite hard truth: Mary was dead, she was gone, she was lost to us forever. Maybe it was just the unhappy time of year working on me. There was no comfort in the thought of Mary lying in that frozen ground, no beauty in the gray, windswept ceremony.
I watched as the mourners filed slowly past the grave before they hurried off to their warm cars. Then Mary’s family placed their flowers on the casket and withdrew. I remained behind as the procession wound back down the hill, watching two workmen in muddy overalls begin the task of covering the grave. A long good-bye was justified, I told myself. It was unlikely that my wanderings would bring me to this cold hillside again.