Among The Roses

Chapter 16: The Weeping of the Rain

AN: The title of this chapter is a line from a poem about death by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm putting it here. Please remember that most poetry is meant to be read out loud. You can't *see* the rhythm when you look at the words, you *must* hear the words spoken to feel the sounds, okay? It is a lovely poem.

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Time Does Not Bring Relief (Sonnet II)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!I
 miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,--so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his faceI say,
"There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

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The day of the funeral, a scant four days later, dawned bright and sunny, and bitterly cold. The sky was deceptively blue, but clouds were building up to the west, dark gray and ominous.

Not that Chiara saw them. Her world had grown very small over the past few days, encompassing the little house she'd shared first with both parents, then just her dad, and the funeral home, and the church in the village where the short service would be held. She had to choose a casket for her father, and she honestly felt like she would lose her mind trying to choose between the different kinds of wood and handles. Honestly, who cared?

But it had to be done.

The boys from Langton were always hovering in the background, offering to help, asking if they could do anything, but she insisted that she could handle everything on her own. Father Haskins, too, asked if there was anyone to assist her, and when he found that there wasn't, if he himself could help, but she refused him as well.

She could manage. Her dad wouldn't want her to start depending on others, before he was even the ground.

She drank tea, and forced herself to eat some toast, but the thought of food was so off-putting that she couldn't bring herself to eat anything substantive, so she got in the car to go to the church service, and then to the cemetery, feeling rather ill and light-headed, but she told herself to stop being a baby, and to just get through this.

She could rest when it was all over.

She was looking forward to shutting herself in her house, taking a hot bath, and maybe ordering some takeaway and just forgetting everything. But she had to get through today first.

There were quite a few people from the village inside the church, though she couldn't figure out how they'd even found out. She certainly hadn't told them. But somehow, people knew that kindly old Bert Cavuto had died of a heart attack, and they'd come to pay their respects.

How kind of them.

One thing that had eased her mind was what the doctor had told her after the autopsy. She said that the heart attack had been sudden and massive, and he'd probably been dead before he'd fallen.

"You could've been standing right next to him, love, and called the ambulance first thing, and it wouldn't have made a difference, truly. I think that even if he'd been in hospital when it happened he probably couldn't have been saved, to tell you the truth. His heart was so tired, it just gave out, you know? It was his time. He needed to have it seen to years ago, but he stopped looking after himself when your mum died, and nothing you could do about it." She patted Chiara's shoulder comfortingly. "It'll all be in my report, you'll have it in a few weeks for your insurance, all right?"