There it was, my name on a headstone. I stared it down, but the shiny black granite stared right back. My cousin came close, his lanky frame swaying over me like a young tree and we stood there in silence.
“When are you getting married?” he eventually asked. My reflection on mortality short-lived as I stumbled for an answer.
“Why do you ask?” His question catching me off-guard.
“I’m tied of funerals,” he murmured. “We could really use a wedding.”
It was true, our small family only ever congregated at unfortunate times, temporarily united in mourning before vanishing from each other’s lives, until the next tragedy.
As a family, we were fortunate—the suffering in our lives was inconsequential to other families where death seemed frequent and unexpected.
For our family, death was a game of patience and inevitability. Whether it was a survival instinct or callous selfishness, we possessed a genetic predisposition to removing the dying from our lives long before they were actually buried.
And there we stood under a pewter sky, the ground still spongy from rain the day before.
My cousin, eyes red from the tears he swallowed waited for an answer. I smiled back. “I don’t recall pressuring you to get married.” I said with a wink.
He smiled back.
At 20, I’d be horrified if he suddenly announced his intentions to wed. Horrified, if not somewhat envious that at 11-years his senior I had languished in my recent romantic pursuits.
I knew he wasn’t asking for a wedding, but he lacked the vocabulary to say he wanted a ritual—in the same way we honour our dead, he was asking us to honour the living.
We assuaged our hearts with empty promises to stay in touch, and commitments to visits we had no intention of honouring.
And then we hugged, warm and fragile, aware that like our predecessors we too shall pass.
