to melt into the sun
In Trinidad for a funeral, a set of circumstances that has become increasingly familiar over the years. There was a time when I resisted attending funerals. Now, ever since Phil’s and the specifics of what prevented me from being at his, I am grateful every time I am able to make it.
Trinidadians are very social about death, which is not the same thing as cavalier. Grief is a shared experience; a wake is a celebration of life.
“In Trinidad for a funeral” is true, and misleading. It is never just the funeral; it is everything before, and there is always so much. And then it is everything after, and there is always so much. Caribbean grief is a series of rituals.
In Trinidad because there is where I need to be right now, because this is where the people who are grieving are gathering, because this is where I am from, because there is a social contract that binds us and it demands that we show up even and especially when it is inconvenient to do so.
Death is never convenient, but it reminds us what it is to live.
RIP, Doc.
Attribution
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance
— On Death from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran