I wasn't at my parents funeral.
Their funeral was an hour ago. I can picture what it must have been like to be there. Flowers on dark polished caskets. Bright white ones that gave an odd sense of hope. Hope that my parents are in a better place. There would be the priest standing at his podium. He never met them, so his speech would be something prewritten on a pamphlet.
There would be a few people there. Their faces… they knew my family in some way, but it would not matter. There would be a cold stone look. I would have seen it in their eyes. An emotional deadness. Too much grief. Even if they didn't know them that well, my parents were not old.
I was finishing the last two years of high school. My parents married young at the ages of 22 and 23. I was born shortly after and my mother had just had her 40 birthday. My dad had bought her drapes that matched the rug.
It was a sudden death. A fire had started in the house and the flames had climbed their way into the sky. The smoke was so thick, the taste. I still can taste it. It lays like metal on my tongue. It wouldn't taste like smoke in the church. No, it would have that old book smell. Bibles at every pew and glass windows. The light would catch the dust particles that would swim in the air. It would be a kind light. A warm glow that offered protection.
At least that's how I think it went down. Three dark polished caskets surrounded in the hope of a happy ever after.
The people who were sitting in those pews didn't know the truth. No one knows the truth. I don't know the truth.
They won't tell me.
All I know is that I , Clare Johnson , was buried with her family on this day.
And that my life would never be mine again