The Memorial Service
They held it in the church he never attended
and said the things that church attendance would imply,
and everyone who showed up comprehended
the gap between the ceremony and the guy
who’d spent his weekend mornings fixing engines
and reading box scores on the front porch until noon.
But the ritual needs its religious regions
and so we borrowed his, the Presbyterian tune
of comfortable Presbyterian consolation.
The memorial service does what it must do,
it marks the space between the living and the through,
it gives the grief a container and a form
and warms the room against the specific storm
of losing someone, the service doing what it must do.
The slideshow was the best part, honestly,
the photos running through the decades in sequence,
the younger image of him impossibly
slim and full of brightness and the essence
of whatever it is that photographs contain
of actual youth before the years accumulate,
and everyone watching laughed and felt the pain
of recognition and the bittersweet weight.
After, people stood around with food
and talked about him in the past tense awkwardly
at first, then easily, as if the mood
had shifted and the ceremony’s awkwardly
formal frame had given them permission
to tell the actual stories, not the polished kind,
the real ones, and the whole strange commission
of a memorial service came to mind:
permission to keep living, to remember, to be.