First VIsit to a Dead Friend - Ralph

 First Visit to a Dead Best Friend

Gravel spitting under the tires of a cemetery road.   Thick windbreaks of trees, branches weaved together to create a thorny wall from the dead and the skeletal cornfield stalks.   Walking down grassy aisles with double headstones for husbands and wives, some spousal deaths on hold for years. 

 My first dead friend visit.  Cheated out of the bereavement airline fare because we didn’t have the same last name.  And after all my rehearsing of what I’d tell him when he couldn’t talk back, I was speechless.  

Finally I pushed out something we both could agree on.  “I wish we were young and telling lies again.” “I never imagined that our hundred or so phone calls the past 6 months wouldn’t cure you”.  Smiling at your last line to me on your death bed, “What’s your mother’s name again? “ (He often threatened the last few months that he’d look up my mother in the afterlife and he’d tell her all the things I had done) 

“Yea my life, just like this empty cemetery in the dusk.  A lot of people around but no one I’d want to talk to.    I’m so angry with you.  I’m all alone just like I’m alone in this farmer’s cemetery.   And our inside jokes?    They’re just “Inside me” jokes now, and they aren’t real fulfilling. I mean, I thought visiting graves was a sport reserved for hopelessly over-weight retired people.  Leaning over headstones and groaning from the effort of rotating seasonal flowers, or pulling weeds while leaking tears.  Christ, I’m only 41.

“I mean, I’m no good at this grieving thing”.  3 visits with a pale, bearded male, HMO approved therapist that gave me a book to read and a workbook to fill out, like some substitute teacher giving me busy work.  My heart is throbbing like a needed root canal, and all that damn shrink wants, is to book the next 3 sessions.