Farewell to Martha Jean

Don Gordon

1939

I stood and watched as the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave. The shiny casket scraped against the pebbles and stones that stuck out from the packed red clay. There was a dull, hollow thud as the wooden box hit the bottom of the pit. It sounded like someone stepping onto a rowing boat- before they set off on a pleasant sail...

One by one the pale-faced pall-bearers dropped their cords and a small handful of dust onto the top off the coffin. The rain began again further streaking mascara and we all shuffled impatiently. Waiting.

We don't remember birth and we can hardly imagine death, but life?

The smells of her eighty four summers around us, cut grass, pine-wood and freshly cut flowers mingled with the moss-ball smell of the Minister and the perfume of the older women- Yves St Laurent and Yardley.

And the younger grandchildren, untidy ties and unlikely shirts and self-conscious adolescents with an innocent incomprehension of age.

The soft weeping of closer relatives and the reverberating barking cough of someone with an unusually heavy cold.

Martha- Jean had gone to meet her still-born first child and her second son who had perished somewhere over the North Sea in December 1939.

Martha-Jean would be missed.

Bye, Gran.