Grieving again and again
It has been 6 months since I last saw Hallelujah’s face. We pulled up to the empty parking lot at McHenry’s Funeral Home, underneath a tree that was thinking about sprouting some color. I found it strange that the girls were so looking forward to seeing her again, because I was dreading it a little. What if she looked…dead? Of course she would look dead. She only really looked alive for a couple of hours of her life, right after she was born, before the seizures and the morphine and the Ativan closed her dark eyes and loosened her clenched fists. We were used to her looking not quite alive, but now we would be looking on her days after dying and I worried that it would be a rough last impression. There was no easy way to do this, so we walked through those doors and into the first room off the lobby. The room felt very empty, with the little Moses basket sitting on a small table in the middle, all alone in the near dark. One lamp stood in the corner, dimmed down to somber the mood, I