They bury them with things in every culture—
the coin for Charon, the bow, the quiver,
the food and tools against a future dark
as any mouth, the loaded things for the crossing
of whatever river waits.
We put his pocket knife inside the casket,
the paperback of books he never finished,
the things that were himself inside a basket
of certainty that something hadn’t diminished
his claim to having lived a particular way.
This is the conversation between the living
and the going:
the practical acknowledgment that something
is still owing to the dead from the living,
that the crossing requires equipping—
whether sword or pocket knife for gripping,
whether coin or rosary or a photograph
from nineteen forty-two, glossy and black
and white, showing the requiem
of youth before the wars and children intervened.
My grandfather put it in himself, gently,
the way you’d tuck someone in—
that unseamed gesture of a man still evidently
in love with the woman going down into the ground.
And the archaeologists dig us up centuries later,
reconstruct from what we buried what we valued,
what we thought would matter in whatever greater
beyond awaits. Isn’t that a strange, hallmarked
way to be remembered:
that the things you chose to send your loved ones with
become the evidence of what you both believed—
the material theology, the physical myth
of what you needed them to have when they were grieved.
We bury them with things in every culture still.
We cannot let them cross empty-handed.
We cannot trust the dark to be enough.
So we equip the crossing.
So we speak across the silence with what’s left.
So we tuck them in.