Eulogy

People think that there are dead people and there are alive people.

They are wrong, for life and death have many colors, one hue bleeding into the next.

When I was a child, I could see the display; skulls, a yellow face, a bloody face,

An ashen face. You did not have to go very far to see them all.

Some walked.

I only ever saw one pair of eyes that truly lived

My father cared, and that burned holes in those around him.

Some said they followed him for he was the strongest,

Some said it was because he was wisest in battle.

Those were lies. If someone cares, you will die for him,

For he is what others will not.

He once sat with a young man from the barracks with a hole for a nose

And charred eyes. Shut up, sir. Shut your face.

He loves you. Shut up. He'll change you. Sir. He'll make you care.

Sir, I would rather die.

We shared a secret, us two, harbored in a cavern where the world could not reach.

The undying triumph of the past.

For the world can snatch the future, and ransack the present.

But the prophets of yesteryear are unequivocal victories.

Their triumph will one day be mine. My father's.

I remember finding my father on a hill and he wept over a half naked woman

With a worm in her eye and her neck missing flesh. 

She must have been very beautiful,

For my mother looked the same and my father said she was very, very, beautiful.

Then my father’s sobs became staccato sounds that could not make the swell of sorrow

Only a cry that escapes from a beast because the man has no more 

Then, crystallizes in a grimace in which the face is frozen

Until each muscle, one by one, lets go.

That is my least favorite hue of death.

That night we talked about Heaven and Resurrection and Hope

How Mother was meeting with our friends Nephi and Alma

Preparing to sail over the seas into the rising sun

A sphere of glass and a sacred stone

It starts in your chest and erases all hues of death

Introduces a new spectrum with colors of life

Bleeding into new colors we've never seen before

Now I walk alone, and all the world waits for me,

The last soul in a self-consuming hell.

I carry the precious weight of my friends, my father's words among them

An undying triumph of the past.

One day, the people of God will go by his name.



Image Credit:https://history.lds.org/exhibit/scenes-from-the-land-of-promise-book-of-mormon-paintings-by-walter-rane?lang=eng