Meredith’s Musing

Almond Eyes | By Meredith McKinnie

We buried my 25-year-old niece a year ago this month.. An appropriately overcast day, the sun refused to shine on our grief. I say our grief, but mine was less than others. This now-adult niece of mine, I hadn’t seen her in almost a decade. Members of the family were estranged, and as a result, so was she from us. When I think of her, I picture a ten-year-old with razor-straight brown hair and almond eyes to match her daddy, always piercing the recipient of her often cold stares, a girl smart enough to see the world for what it was and rebel against its harshness.
I saw my brother’s grief camouflaged behind his welcoming smile. His skin is dark, leathered from years spent on rooftops. He radiates a warmth from piercing blue eyes that soften his sometimes direct words lathered in southern twang. He too has seen life’s harshness up close. He buried his own mother before his tenth birthday, an age when children know what death is, but shouldn’t know how it feels. His left arm ends just below his elbow, the result of a crash at 18. A passenger with two other boys, he’s the only one who now only waves with his right hand. I saw him use his half-arm to comfort his daughter’s mother, the two having reunited months before their daughter’s death.
I saw my sister, who also lost her mother decades earlier, crying between deep breaths and smiling for the sake of people she hadn’t seen in awhile. I think, like me, she was feeling for her brother, for his loss. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children. It goes against nature and the accepted order of things. People feel the loss of children so much harder because it forces them to imagine losing their own. And though the woman in the casket was in her mid-twenties, she was our brother’s little girl. And now she was gone.
My brother and my niece’s mother asked me to write the eulogy. Though honored, I struggled for substance. I had to find out who she was, and then try to capture her essence in a few paragraphs. It felt right that they asked me, but disingenuous discovering the details of her life posthumously. On paper I was the right choice, but I felt my niece would think of me as an impostor. I somehow found the words.
As people passed by the casket after the service, each stopped and hugged my brother, exchanged a few words, wiped tears. From the second row, I saw the same expression over and over, sadness for their friends and silent prayers of thanks it’s not them. The open casket served as a background to each embrace, my niece’s almond eyes forever closed. When an elderly lady stopped to hug my niece’s mother, I noticed her brightly colored nails, alternating orange and black on each finger. She would probably attend a Halloween carnival in a few days, perhaps hold her grandchildren a little tighter.
At the graveside, the preacher reiterated the words from the church, of God’s healing grace and prayers of comfort. The green canopy arched over the freshly dug hole, alongside my brother and sister’s mother’s tombstone, my niece’s great-grandmother she never knew, erected 36 years ago, two months to the day after my birth. It was around Mother’s Day. I wonder if it was also overcast. I watched my niece’s two little children, a boy and a girl, five and four, squirm restlessly in laps on the front row. The stillness of the crowd, the tears in strangers’ faces must have confused them. As the people dispersed, I saw my niece’s son examining the casket held up above the dirt. He kept bending over, pointing in the hole, as if contemplating the rationality of his mother being left there. It didn’t make sense to a five-year-old.
It didn’t make sense to me either. One day she was here, and then she was gone, and then we put her in the ground. My brother had sat in this same spot 36 years before as a little boy, burying his mother. I wondered if he had the same questions as his grandson, if he looked at the red dirt and the wooden box and wondered why.
I walked back to the parking lot, listening to the crunch of rocks as car after car pulled away. My brother and niece’s mother climbed into his big white truck and disappeared behind the tinted glass. Were they glad it was over or scared of life without her beginning? I pulled away without an answer, and now a year has passed, and I’m still too scared to ask.