Genevieve

Prompt: Describe a scene from my life, exploring the idea that life is a story/movie.

I began to cry.

I was almost a teenager, and I was wearing nice clothes. The chair I sat in didn’t even feel real. She was dead. She was in a box covered in flowers, and we sat under a tent. A man was talking.

And she was dead.

The reality found me and stared at me. For the past eight years, I hadn’t known who she was. She hadn’t either, but maybe I could have tried. Could I have found her in there?  Thinking like this wouldn’t do anything. I was helpless.

So I cried harder. My cousin put her arm around me, and she cried, too. Everyone could hear me, and I knew it. I no longer wept for her only, I wept for myself. I wept for those who would be covered in flowers and lowered into the ground. Tissues were offered, and I faintly heard the kind words said.

The box descended. We stood and we left.

Later, when we were surrounded by food and light, someone told a story. When my cousins were little, she had given them vegetable crackers as an afternoon snack. She had thought that they were more nutritious than other kinds of crackers.

I didn’t really understand the joke, because I had never heard of vegetable crackers. The others were laughing, so I laughed with them. It made me feel better.

She had been a kind woman, a good woman, but she had not escaped death. Death had left its mark on her life; she had lost a husband and two sons. I wondered if these losses made her stronger. I had never asked her.

My heart had never fully realized that I would die. Now I knew. How would it change me?