After he died, we went to the local Wal-mart

And bought the nicest clothes we could find there

What I would have worn, had I known, was in the closet at home.

The brown corduroy skirt and striped button up

Would just have to do.

It snowed,

Those enormous, wonderful flakes

Falling faster than we could drive

Down the dark country road back to his dark country house

Where a reunion that we all imagined would take place

Was instead met with sullen, mournful silence

And the image of my cousins carrying the casket down the steps of the funeral home,

And the memory of sitting at the gravesite, freezing in the winter chill.

My mom had her scarf wrapped all the way around her head

Her posture as stiff as the wind

As those men from the military folded up the flag

Painfully, poignantly slow,

Before handing it to her.

I don’t think she cried, not then.

But I cried.

And sometimes I still cry

Thinking about his laugh and his jokes and how he put peanut butter on everything

Including Cheez-its and radishes

And how his friends toasted his memory after the service by doing the same.

I can still see the handwriting on the flower arrangements,

“We’ll miss you, old friend.”

His was not the first death I had grieved,

But his was the first that was unexpected

Sharp, and fierce, like a stab or a burn

Leaving a scar that never feels quite right.

After he died, as we drove away from the house,

Returning home with our Wal-mart funeral clothes in tow

I watched the red sun rising over the fields

Thinking

I can never come back here.

This was like another unexpected death,

And I wiped away a fresh set of tears, knowing that even if I did return

He would not be there,

And I would never be the same.