The Black Dress at the Burial

The Black Dress at the Burial

She wore the same black dress she’d worn to three
other funerals in the past five years,
a woman of a certain age knows that the three
constants of her wardrobe are the gears
of celebration, church, and dark occasion,
and she’d learned to keep the dress maintained
for this arithmetic of loss, the equation
of a life that keeps on going while it’s rained
with exits, one by one, until the math
is just you and the dress and the few left.

The black dress at the burial is a kind of armor,
a way of marking that today the day is harder
than most days, that we are here to honor
what the year has taken, what’s a goner,
the black dress at the burial is a kind of armor.

I watched her at the reception afterward
and noticed how she moved through it with purpose,
speaking to the younger ones who were floored
by the loss, who didn’t know the surface
rules of grief, who didn’t know to eat
or what to say or whether it was fine to laugh,
and she showed them, gently, how to meet
the grief and keep on walking by its path.

She’s been to so many of these now
that she carries the tradition in her body,
she knows the when and what and why and how
of being present for the grief, the sturdy
presence that a community requires,
someone who has done this long enough to know
that the ritual serves the living, and acquires
its meaning from the repetition and the flow.