Better This Way
This story shall speak of dark themes. Pardon my writing.
Enjoy.
"As a child, I talked like a child, reasoned like a child, and thought like a child. When I grew up, I put aside these childish ways." - 1 Corinthians 13:11
It was a very dark and mournful day.
Someone important had died, and the assembly of the usual relatives and close friends has filed in, faces down, eyes wandering far away, hands clasped together and flinching. They appear before me and shuffle through pointless words of sympathy and uncomfortable touches.
"I'm so sorry…" they say.
"Such a mournful loss..." they say.
"Perhaps, it's better this way..." they say.
If someone told me those words nine years ago, my then-naïve mind would not have understood a shred of what it meant. If someone told me those words three years ago, I would have cursed the fool who dared to even utter that to me to eternal damnation, and resented him for all eternity, both in life and thereafter.
My chuckle was discreet as I stood before the rusting gates of the columbarium. They loomed over me, reflecting a mocking gleam towards my direction from what little light was present as those words repeatedly played in my mind.
"It's better this way…"
Those were the same words spoken to me.
The words, which were spoken by my arrogant grandfather, no less.
I was seven when I attended my first funeral. So young back then, so awfully naïve. Many had said to my mother, that I was too young to understand the significance of it all. Those rites, the processions, the unending chanting, all of which my unknowing mind found enchanting, intriguing and magical at first. But in the end, anything that involved keeping quiet for too long, keeping impossibly still for inhuman lengths of time, I simply saw as boring!
I can only remember the briefest details of what happened then, mostly between me and my mother. We were seated somewhere in the middle of the congregation, far off from what was going on up in the front, where the procession was taking place, with my mother on my right, and my annoying grandfather to my left. I heard the various chanting coming from the fat balding old man dressed in long, black robes that draped over his body, all spoken in a language completely alien to me. All I knew was that this procession my mother had brought me to was incredibly boring, and all the while I was fidgeting impatiently in my seat, trying not to yield to my urge to make any noise.
However, whilst I was being told off by my grandfather for being so disrespectful, whom I noticed was being unusually quiet, I also saw that my mother was crying.
Why would she be crying?
All I could register in my mind then, was that crying didn't mean any good, and that crying meant someone was sad. This greatly angered the seven-year-old me, who hated to see his mother being so sad.
I remember gently tugging on her hand, trying to comfort her, asking her the reasons for her sorrow, before I got rudely interrupted by my grandfather with a single grunt which meant for me to keep quiet. I looked back at her, but she was still crying.
What happened next was quite a blur to me. I saw the people in the foremost row standing up suddenly, moving towards this huge arrangement filled with flowers, with a picture of a young lady in the centre. Quickly, they all gathered before the picture in a semi-circle, blocking what was going on from my sight, but I saw them bowing before the picture, raising their hands up and down as they did so.
I did not have to wait long to know what they were doing, as soon after, we arose from our seats, and dragged by my mother's tear-soaked hand we quickly shifted over to a small table next to the arrangement, with the same picture of the same young lady in the center. I was given a long thin grey stick to hold, and I meekly accepted it. I quietly followed the movements of the people around me, raising the grey stick up and down slowly as they did so, then placing the stick in a jar full of grey-like dust. I returned to my seat with the others, and I continued sitting down, all the way until the fat balding man in black robes finished his chanting. At last, I was given permission to stand up and stretch, after experiencing such a prolonged period of inactivity between my limbs.
This cumbersome ritual for sad people was over.
It was only a week after that I learned that I had attended a Buddhist funeral wake - a procession for the dead, and that the fat balding man was actually a Buddhist priest, reading from an important book called the "sutra". Why he was there in the first place escaped my curiosity, but I still had a question in mind.
When I inquired who had died, my mother broke down into fresh tears. My grandfather answered instead, with a heavy, stoic tone in his voice.
"She was a close friend of your mother's."
And we left it at that.
It was a surprise that only six years later, I would be back in the same procession again.
Only this time, I was the relative of the deceased, and that I would be at the very front of the congregation, gathered before the funeral arrangement. This time, it was I who was weeping so silently before it. This time, the deceased would be someone especially close to me, someone who had lost her life fighting a losing battle against the vicious claws of cancer.
This time, the deceased would be my mother.
Of course, everything was prepared and paid for by my grandfather. Being a traditional man with deep roots to his culture, the entire thing was done in the Buddhist context once more. A portrait of my mother was placed before the funeral arrangement in the center, which was decorated with grand flower arrangements and littered with multitudes of petals. She was smiling gracefully in the picture, and out of my sorrowful delusion, I thought I could see a twinkle in her eyes, the same spark I saw in her back when she was still alive, almost as if the picture itself contained a living, breathing woman.
But the chanting of a new Buddhist priest conducting the wake brought me back to sanity.
The sutra, as I now remembered, was supposed to be said in order to commemorate the life of the deceased, and as a prayer for her soul.
The time then came for the family members to gather around the arrangement and raise the grey sticks up and down again. Of course, I had found from my grandfather out before the wake that this was the offering of incense to the deceased, and it was to be done thrice. Whether or not there was an intended significance, I did not know, nor did I bother to find out.
None of this would have brought her back.
None of these rituals and chanting would have made any damn difference in the world.
My world, as I knew it, had come to a standstill. Time, for me, had frozen in place.
The smells from the flower arrangement were heavy, laced with the crinkled scent of formaldehyde, smoke and silk. Together, they were a perfume in the air, thick and sweet and timeless, driving like a steel spike through my nose and into my brain. I was pinned to the seat, ensnared with the lull of dizziness and pain.
I thought back to the final moments before she finally gave in, back in the whitewashed rooms of the hospital.
I was next to her hospital bed, standing, refusing to look at her feeble form. I had refused to accept the reality that her ailment was swiftly taking her away as the days went by. I was looking down, my eyes cast on the floor, hoping my long fringe would hide my tears.
But of course, mother knew everything. There was nothing I could have possibly hidden from her all-knowing intuition. Seeing through my guise, she brushed away the locks that shielded my face, and cupped my cheeks. She spoke, telling me not to cry, not to be sad.
"But… How can I? You're leaving me and-, and I-," I broke down before her, throwing myself on her weakened body, hugging her small frame with trembling arms.
"Now, Shun, it's alright." She gently patted my head, whispering comfortingly into my ear. "I will never leave you, you know that."
My train of thought was interrupted when I felt a wrinkly hand tugging on my shoulder. I looked up to see my grandfather staring back at me, beckoning me to leave.
The wake had ended.
I stood up, seeing crowds of people come up to my grandfather to offer their condolences and words of sympathy. Several came to me to offer words of pity and affirmation to my mother.
"She was such a great woman…"
"I'm so sorry…"
Wrinkly hands were clasped around my shoulders, hands I recognized. The words that came, however, were totally unexpected.
"Perhaps, it's better this way…"
I slapped off both hands away from my shoulders, and I fled the hall, tears streaking down my cheeks.
…
Now, if someone said those words to me today, what would I have done?
I pushed through the columbarium gates, making a horrid creaking noise as I did so from years of underuse. Quickly, I pushed through the wooden doors of the old building, a dank scent overtaking me.
No one had come in here for years. It was surprising to see the magic of time and neglect, how a once well-furbished building had so quickly degenerated into an abandoned warehouse of ashes in just three years, but no one had bothered with it at all.
I moved through the rows of shelves. Stopped at the "S" section. Shuffled in, looking for a certain name.
I brushed my hand across the small boxes held within the shelves, until I finally found her plaque.
Shiori Kazami
July 1972 to August 2007
Missed dearly by her father and her son.
Would it have been better this way?
I had long accepted her death since then.
But sometimes, I wish she wasn't gone. I wish she was still next to me.
I wish her name wasn't there, engraved on the bronze plaque.
I would have done nothing.
Nothing, but accept that nature had finally claimed her.
I placed a dahlia before her plaque, and left.
Well, here's my oneshot at last. For what it's worth, based on literary devices alone, I would consider this to have done exceptionally well.
But as you can tell, this is incomplete. Unsatisfactory. I don't want to leave it like this, and I won't.
This is very short, compared to my standard writing...
Review, please?