Marvin's Eulogy-final chapter

I've never been good with funerals, mourning, or grief. I don't berate myself for that. But sitting at my desk, trying in vain to process how things are, versus how they might have been, versus how they were, I feel like I've missed something.

And so I turn back to the screen, where I'm dutifully doing my job, staring at line after line of text, trying to give the submissions that we've been sent "meaningful, yet critical feedback" (as the mission statement reads) and I know I'm done here. This isn't the work that I wanted. I went to school. I got a degree. I found a job, at least somewhat related to that degree. I've always said that I could do any job, no matter where, or what, and find happiness in it. I'm beginning to think that this is what grief does to us. And I turn to the last page of Marvin's story, placing the page I've finished reading in the upturned lid of the giant box it came in to the left of my keyboard, and staring down into the now seemingly cavernous box at the final page. It's barely half a page really, and it reads:

Sue stood over his plot, after the other few mourners had gone. She'd told Jennings that she'd meet him at home for supper. Reaching into the recesses of the dark woolen coat that she reserved for funerals, she found it, the small bit of paper, gently folded into quarters, and then quarters again, to reduce its size to virtually nothing. She had no more tears to shed, only resolute desire to let things be...to let things go...

Unfolding it, letting it grow between her wind-burned fingers, she strove to grasp it gently even though the strong winter winds threatened to tear it from her.

She read, quietly, barely aloud,

"You're a bird that's flown away.
You're the spiraling plume a smoke in the distance
You're the unexplained palm and fingers, too high up on the wall.
You're what no one thinks of, when they think of love.
It's not what I miss, but everything I dream."

And she let it go, letting the wind take it away, across the plots, twisting and dipping in the wind around the headstones, and into the countryside.

I had no comments for that page.

Later as I walked home, climbing the steps and finding my way to the living room, I understood, for perhaps the first time, grief, and mourning, and loss, and funerals, and dark woolen coats kept in the back of closets, under plastic, to only be worn for such moments. I don't own a coat like that. I refuse to. Instead I sat down at the piano that I hadn't touched, save to brush the dust off of it, since before I lived alone. It was the family piano--dad had moved out of the old house after I did, and didn't have the space, and so asked that I take it. Grudgingly at the time, as was the way that I did everything then, I engineered it's removal and replacement in my apartment.

And I played a waltz, like the ones that I'd heard grandma play at family gatherings when I was little, and I missed some notes, and then missed them on purpose the second time through, deciding to call it revision instead of mistake. And it went like this...

You're a bird that's flown away.
You're the spiraling plume a smoke in the distance
You're the unexplained palm and fingers, too high up on the wall.
You're what no one thinks of, when they think of love.
It's not what I miss, but everything I dream.

...