I buried my father on Dragon’s Mass Eve. I dug the grave myself, there on the hill overlooking our homestead, beside the grave he dug for my mother some thirty-five years earlier.
As I worked the shovel, I tried not to cry. I failed. And I recited the Cycle, just the way he taught me, as I cut the sod and turned the dirt out into a pile.
Muscles tire. It was as if he stood with me. I could hear his voice grumbling on the wind that rose as the sun dropped and the air cooled. “Pause, Melody Constance,” he said. “Feel what the writer intended with the words.”
I felt my foot upon the shovel, my shoulders as I bent and lifted dirt. I felt the hollow empty place inside that tried to swallow me whenever my eyes wandered to the wagon and the red-wrapped body laying there.
Words fail. Again, a hesitation, a waiting. Silence to honor the moments no words can carry.
Like this one.
Only, it didn’t feel like a moment—it felt like a year, in the cold, working the shovel. Alone. Orphanhood settled onto my back and shoulders with a weight I’d never felt before. I had no memory of my mother; she’d died the morning I was born. So it was a loss I assumed and grew into, never really knowing what I’d missed out on other than those times I stayed with neighboring families when my father needed to travel. But even then, it was only the slightest taste of someone else’s life. Working the mine and farm with my father was my life. And so was Dragon’s Mass Eve—his favorite and only holiday—spent quietly at home in our red paper hats and our fruit salad and rice stew while the faithful gathered at church.
Faith fades. Fear falls.
My mind blurred with my eyes as the tears overpowered me. The questions began to rise even as the fear fell upon me. What will I do now? Where will I go? How will I ever learn to live around this vast hole in my heart?
They were all things we’d talked about in passing when he talked in the midst of his illness about not getting better. And I knew that I would find the desk in his office perfectly organized with carefully written instructions for everything that needed to be done and everyone that had to be contacted. He’d learned to be meticulous during forty years working in the Bureaucracy’s supply chain, and he’d instilled it into me. I think I was six when he put the first of many carefully scripted lists into my hands and sent me off to do my chores.
But having a plan and executing said plan were not the same thing.
My eye wandered to the wagon again, and I tried to tell myself it was because I was measuring how much further I had to dig. But I knew better. It was because I was close to finished. And when I was done digging, when I eased my father into that hole, he would be gone. I would only ever see him again in memory and dreams, in the half-dozen photographs tucked into our leatherbound copy of the Cycle.
This would be our last Dragon’s Mass Eve together. My last time reciting the words with him. Our conversation earlier that morning would be the last we ever had, and it broke my heart open even further.
I went through the Cycle three times before I finished digging, from muscles tire to upon his back, a world, quoting from the Authorized Standard Version that my father had studied during the single year he spent in seminary. It was the version he’d memorized as a part of his training, and though he’d set aside his faith years before, he still felt it had enough merit that his daughter should know it. So now I said the words, felt none of them, and gentled my father into his grave.
The night was clear and cold but I paid it no mind. The hymn might’ve promised that the Santaman’s grace would find us here, but the reality was I’d already seen at least a half-dozen clear and cold Dragon’s Mass Eves, and the Santaman had yet to come back, reeking of anything, much less love. There had been, according to my father, over two hundred and thirty seven cold, clear Dragon’s Mass Eves to be exact, much to the great consternation of the few remaining theologians.
We were on our own.
I was on my own.
I shoveled the earth over him and went through the Cycle another three times for good measure. But even as I did, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. It was my first lesson in grief—that there never, ever was enough when it came to those we lost.
On my last Dragon’s Mass Eve with Father, the rice stew grew cold upon the stove and I did not kneel and pray to the north. Instead, I cried myself to sleep, still covered in the dirt and drying sweat of my father’s grave-digging.