Why is it that the smallest coffins are the heaviest?

It should be the big ones. The big, thick-walled, cream-paneled ones with the silver hinges and gleaming lids for army sergeants or firemen or presidents or beloved actors or royalty. The ones that dozens carry and dozens trail down the aisle after, and the ones that millions of people gather to see and watch on T.V. and force tears for.

But no. It’s the ones that you carry alone.

The ones that are full of not only the body, but also the hopes and dreams that will never come true, and the clothes he will never grow into, and the yawning room that’s been emptied of his furniture, and the tears, the ocean of tears, that bathes everything around you in salt and stings every inch of your skin and freezes around every single action and thought, making it heavy, too heavy, unbearably heavy, until you can’t move or think or even cry.

It’s the one that I am watching my husband carry down the aisle, alone, to the carved-out hole in the ground. The headstone has been hastily jammed into the ground and isn’t even big enough for a name and a date. I don’t know how someone managed to scrape the hole out of the ground. It’s frozen solid.

I am beckoned to the grave.

The coffin is laid on the ground facing it. My husband is saying something, and he’s looking at me with pleading eyes that are begging me to look up, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the frozen ground and the gaping wound in it. There’s loose grass and clumps of ice and dirt scattered around it. Why do we kill more things because one thing died?

I pick up the coffin.

I don’t know why it’s so heavy.