Church for the Dead

The Day of the Dead isn't something that our culture, that my church, officially acknowledges. I love my faith, but there is something sad in our Protestant blandness - even the name of the movement is bland: "Protestant." As if all we care about is shaming everyone else. Although, when I listen to the gossip at after-church coffee, maybe it's accurate. Stu was telling the new cop - Coulson, I think? - about the kids who drove through my field. Saying they ought to be thrown in prison, made an example out of. As if he forgot about the time he nailed a coyote pelt to Ms. Talles' front door when he had to repeat Freshman Speech. Or when he backed up the Solomon Irrigation Canal because he wanted to prove his fishing boat would float in it. Or...well this isn't supposed to be about Stu's hypocrisy. It's about mine.

I suppose the idea of a day when the spirit world is closer to ours appeals to me the same reason it would appeal to anyone. There are so many people I want to talk to again. Grandfathers I want to ask for advice. A father, who never knew if I'd keep this farm going. A mother whose love didn't care. And Kelly...

You just don't fall in love again the way you fall in love when you're a teenager. Even if you feel the pain and the yearning for someone just as strong, it's never quite as unexpected. It's never as new. Farming, now, I wouldn't do anything else. But back then, it wasn't part of the plan at all. Or rather, "not farming" was the entire plan. Everything else was up in the air, confusing and uncertain, except for Kelly. I knew that whatever I was going to do was going to be with her. For her. I'd live where she wanted to live, do whatever would make her happy. If she wanted poems, if she wanted feasts, if she wanted furs, I'd make them for her.

Wives tend to outlive their husbands - I'd thought this plan through! But she never became my wife. A crowded lake, an extra beer, a kid too young behind a boat's wheel...it was the first funeral I'd ever been to. The first time my friends saw me cry. The first time I saw them as something besides my friends, as people who didn't understand me. Ciphers in friend suits.

You don't learn how to talk about something like that, growing up in a small town. You don't learn to deal with that kind of loss, and pain. You try to push it down, but everytime you have more than a couple of drinks it starts to come out. It comes out in tears, in anger, in dangerous actions. Self-harm of one form or another. I had to quit drinking in college, for a couple of years. I still am real careful.

The good thing about leaving town is, I learned to feel sad about it. To talk about it. To work through it. Except for to Tara. Tara doesn't like to hear about Kelly. She doesn't say so, but she disappears inside herself when it comes up. The one person I'm supposed to be able to tell anything to, I just can't. She thinks it's just this little part of my past. And it is that, but it's also a big part of who I am every day. Luke the Labrador has heard about it a hundred times. And now you. 

But no one has heard more about it than Kelly. It's why I go to church - the ritual, the prayers, they're the tools I have to get closer to whatever world the dead live in. And while the preacher talks about Jesus' boundless love, I'm telling Kelly about mine. Especially this time of year. The barrier between us feels so much thinner.