Monday Music: The Mourning Sounds of Leonard Cohen

To Have Doubts Is To Be Human

My voice has grown heavy. Weary. A rasp robbed of strength. I watched my mother’s casket lowered into the dirt. I choked up briefly. Didn’t cry. She’d already traveled the road that had to be traveled, lost herself along the say, lost us, so I can’t dry. Not yet.

Still, I struggle. I listen to The Beatles, as I always do in late October as my birthday approaches. I’m now 60. Jack Kerouac died at 47. John Lennon at 40. Bob Dylan is still alive. My mother is not.

We buried my mother Thursday. In a grave beside her mother. Lowered the pine casket into the earth, each of us placing three shovelfuls of dirt atop her coffin.

The sky was wide open. Cloudless. If I believed in a heaven, I’d say it was opening itself to accept her, to raise her into its embrace. If I was religious, I might take solace in the Kaddish, which praises and pleads with god but says nothing about the dead.

Wind blew the yarmulkes from our heads. Dried the few tears that came to my eyes. I haven’t cried. Not really. Neither have my brother and sister. My dad has cried. Struggles to finish stories without welling up. I haven’t.

I wonder why this is. Why her loss has not left me bereft. Broken. There are no rules for grief. There are stages, according to the psychologists. Customs dictated by religion. But no rules. No game plan to follow.