The word mourn is a verb. Contrary to what our teachers told us, a verb is not just a doing word. A verb also conveys a mode of being. To mourn is not merely when you feel and show intense sorrow over someone’s death, the disappearance of someone, but when you feel and do not show that sorrow. Instead you reside in an unseen state of undoing.
It would be good if we could time our visit to Holy Cross when there’s a funeral in progress. This would provide us with a visual element.
I’ve only happened to be there once when a service was taking place. At first I couldn’t see it. I heard some music playing, austere, delicate but discordant, so I began walking in that direction.
After walking awhile I saw the funeral, on the other side of the hill: a crowd of people wearing black clothes—this is a long-held social convention. The mourners were so tiny from far away, like black specks, sad insects. The hearse looked like a toy. There was smog in the air that day and the scene was smudgy at the edges; it reminded me of that unfinished painting of Baudelaire’s funeral, which hardly anyone attended, apparently, because most of his friends were away on holiday and Paris was so hot!
As I made my way toward the mourners, the music stopped. A recording; there was no sign of an orchestra. Feeling somewhat exposed, I stood behind a scrawny tree. I could make out a black speck with a dash of violet and red that I presumed was the priest. I could not hear his homily, but I figured he was talking of dust and valleys and shadows of death. I wondered if his words were providing solace or if the mourners collectively refused to be consoled. Though surely there would be vast degrees of feeling between those in attendance. Some of the mourners are unbearably sad, I thought, while others are mildly upset, and others aren’t sad at all.
Slowly, a black shiny rectangle emerged from the hearse: the coffin. There was a black shimmering in the air: the coffin was moving, supported by four black vertical shapes that I deduced were men in suits. Some of these men would have needed to rent their suits. I left my threadbare hiding spot. I wanted to see the coffin being lowered into the ground; I’ve never seen that.
I did not want to be accused of showing disrespect, so I could not get near enough to see the coffin properly—the lowering—but I became aware of a thin black vertical shape topped off with a broad black horizontal sphere that I reasoned was a woman wearing a hat. She must be the widow of the man being buried, I thought. Widows wear large hats. The widow shape began to shake, she must be weeping, I thought, and she followed the shimmering as it began to . . . descend and then she and her shape went horizontal; she must be bending down to throw some dirt on her husband’s coffin, I thought. I caught a flash of something very white; I inferred she had taken off one of her gloves.
The black widow shape became vertical again, and I was about to edge in even closer, so I could see the look on her face, which might have disclosed what she was truly feeling, or perhaps denied it, but then I heard a cry on the wind and the sphere flew off her head and began tumbling toward me, like an abstract tumbleweed. She called out to me to grab it, but I acted like I didn’t hear. As my grandma said, it’s bad luck to touch a widow’s hat.
And I began walking in the opposite direction.