Remember, Emmie.

Remember, Emmie - Part 1

Whether the winter had wandered back around yet or not, she couldn't tell. It all seemed cold lately. Sitting, leant on one arm, where they had once planted flowers seemed to make her allergic the way her eyes puffed up and softened. It was the morning of the third day after. The beads were still unstrung beside the needle on the kitchen table. Her mother had asked her gently but blankly to clean them up earlier, since family was arriving shortly, but the pattern on her best dress, the one her grandmother had made, was stitched with the pattern she was learning. She figured her mother would have understood, if only she was able to squeak the words out. No, instead she went to the garden in the back behind the house where their land stretched for a few hundred meters.

As a child that back yard seemed endless, a meadow like the ones her grandmother had always spoken of when telling stories of her own youth. The grass was how her and her grandmother bonded. Between their toes, tickling their elbows, indistinguishable between their hair as they laid down side by side on nearly every afternoon visit over the summers of her life. The summers of her life- now ended- just as winter was approaching.

She wondered whether her mother had noticed the days growing shorter, or if she noticed when the sun was up at all, considering the darkness she was under.

"Cars are pulling up, Emmie. Could you come inside, please?" beckoned her father from the back porch.

All she saw, by the time she turned to face him, was his frame turn around heading inside and the sound of the screen door sighing shut- the same sigh Emmie made lifting herself off the grass.

Just as her father had said, people were slowly coming down the driveway and into the house. Family members, cousins, aunts, uncles, more distant relatives, neighbours, close friends, less close friends, her friends, our friends, their friends, all came in to remember a lady they were surely going to miss.

"What does death really mean, if we believe in an afterlife?" - Emmie found herself asking around.

Some thought it was rhetorical, since surely a 10 year old didn't seriously want to know. They pressed their lips together and either looked a moment up or down before making a long 'hmmm' sound to insinuate that they were thinking. Some, like her uncle, said plainly, "Death on earth, well, it means that this is just the end of one phase of our eternal life-- that after this we live on in Skyworld." That much she had already been told and had already agreed with. So, next. Others, when approached with the question were quite simply approached too early and had neither words nor thoughts past their grief, and Emmie thought that that was justifiably okay, and gave them a hug and left them to themselves.

The house had begun to get stuffy, not just by the weight of the air already breathed, but by the weight of the event that had just occurred- the burial. As if it would have been any less light had there just been a death and not a funeral. So she stepped out again, unnoticed and unjacketed, to the family's circle of white pine trees, which her ancestors planted to be a spot where the family might all go to remember those passed on from this life.

She seated herself by the stone-fire pit in the center looking into the wood ashes of nights gone by feeling a strange feeling. She felt a calm absence, a sad hopefulness, that the life of her grandmother was not over, even though she couldn't understand how or why. From behind her inched through the bristles and brush of the grown trees what sounded like a doe, careful and patiently surveying, but the sound of her grandfather rang through her ears saying, "thought it was still a summer's night out here by the fire, did you?", as he took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. They sat together a moment.

"Do you know what these rocks represent?" He asked with an old voice.

"I didn't know they represented anything." Emmie stated.

"Well of course they do! In a circle of remembrance like this things always have their meaning. Each stone here has been placed in memory of an ancestor of yours. Our family has been doing it for generations."

"Is this where grandmother's will go?" The young girl quarried.

"In fact, it is, my love. And what else, this is where my will go. This is where yours will go."

"Mine can't go anywhere else?"

"I suppose it could, but this is our tradition. The reason people come to remember their ancestors is because our lives in Skyworld only last as long as those who we loved and love us on earth remember us. If your rock were laid somewhere else, how would people know where to go and remember you?"

"I'd leave a note?"

Grandfather laughed at her cuteness and knew she was only joking.

"Don't worry, grandfather, I wouldn't want my rock to be placed anywhere else."

The two sat, staring at the fireplace, until the sun was a small red circle on the horizon, unable to breach past the trees, and the warmth of the daytime was all but gone.

Then they went back inside.