Washington Reid Patrick III 1979-2014
My nails have the dirt they'll press on and around you caked underneath them. I grabbed the dirt with my bare hand. No shovel. I held it aloft and envisioned you in the iteration I knew best, the boy I joined on so very many escapades.
And now I've borne your weight with other men who knew that boyhood form of you, and the versions of you in the times since life took you and me on separate journeys. I stood as holy men intoned, and widow and parents wept. Tears of my own welled and rolled, as I made witness to their pain.
When you and I were acolytes, peeking behind the curtain of that venerable church, where the man after whom I'm named has lain so long his headstone has been engulfed by the soil, I never considered I'd see you put to eternal rest in that same place.
I released that fist of dirt and it thudded impotently on the lid of the metal sarcophagus we'd put your coffin inside and lowered to finality. Water was welling in your grave.
Fare thee well, my friend.
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