With poignancy and striking imagery, Epitaph expresses the complexity and grace sometimes offered to the memory of a deceased parent.
Epitaph
by Opal Gayle
My father’s grave is pink, topped with identical swirly mounds
Two large cupcakes piled high with whipped cream – almost too pretty for a man.
Whose idea was it to make graves beautiful?
To carve beauty into stone as if grief could ever bloom.
I did not attend the funeral
Somewhere at the crossroads of anger and performative devotion,
I signed up for a language course and headed for Quebec.
Later, I stared at the pictures and video that my neighbor Pam sent via messenger.
I absorbed the stillness, his pursed lips, his crossed hands.
It is all wrong: the plastic laminate store bought coffin, the suit, the unshaved beard.
How do I tell them about his Sunday morning ritual? – the broken piece of mirror propped up on the windowsill, cheeks puffed up, stretching his skin into a tight canvas for the thin razor that he glides fearlessly.
Who do I tell that he never liked jackets? – that on the dressiest of occasions,
Delroy the tailor knew only to make him pants
and a matching vest with the shiny satin panel in the back,
This he wore with his good shirt and tie – not a jacket in sight.
I look at his crossed hands
Hands that milked cows, planted yellow yam
Hands that spent many days and nights, romancing pieces of stubborn cedar wood,
Planing, sanding, whistling a happy tune,
firing up the old noisy compressor to lacquer the finished products into final masterpieces:
Another chair, another dresser, another coffin, so many coffins
I look at his crossed hands
Hands that whipped me, that cut my doll Shernette into a million little pieces, when the neighbor’s daughter got pregnant.
Yet, these were the same hands that washed me after Mother left, that held mine tight as we crossed busy streets.
These hands now darkened, wrinkled, cold
crossed in devotion
Hands whose labor has ended.
My father’s grave is cold, sealed shut, he is gone.
Taking all his stories,
Taking his knowledge of herbs;
taking the name my mother withheld from me.
Grief comes in waves, some gentle and caressing,
Others crashing violently against the rocky shore of my heart.
It’s too late now.
- To shave him
- To take off the over-sized jacket
- To ask him ‘how could you accept the $100k so that rapist could walk free?’
- Too late to gather wood, to carve it; to build him his own perfect coffin from the finest cedar or guango tree
- Too late to ask him everything I would have had I known he would not live forever.
I look at the only picture of us together
I laugh, I cry, I dare to say, “you always did take my stepmother’s side; eff you!”
But, on the nights I wake up in cold sweat from the recurring dream,
The one where I open the fridge, and he is lying prostrate in the vegetable crisper
I grab hold of one of my mother’s songs:
“Precious Lord, take my hand …”
Opal Gayle is a Jamaican-born writer and educator. She is the recipient of the St Botolph’s Club Foundation Emerging Grant, and a finalist in the Miami Book Fair Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Switch, and WOW.