After the Funeral | From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

After the Funeral
by Lisa Erin Robertson



To acknowledge that we

were doing well, my mother

and I made plans, specific times

and restaurants, films and

the friends of my parents, who also

worried about her, and we were never

late, never kept each other waiting, and if

I stayed, she made up the guest room

as she had never bothered when he

was living, like a confirmed agenda could mitigate

an absence; and she who never stopped

being beautiful for him bought thick

sweaters after he died, Fisherman’s

Wife sweaters, knotted boiled

wool for waiting in Northern winds

outside the recoil of waves, so why just

weeks before her death did we go

to the shipwreck cemetery on the Point Reyes

Peninsula, where the last

dead man was buried in 1927 and had

nothing to do with us or my father? Why

did we take the dog and pictures

of ourselves on fallen alder trees, laughing

against the wind that blew

a path from us to the sea?



The Writer’s Almanac for August 1, 2015 | After the Funeral | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor



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