![]() Sacrificial LambA Poem by Taylor St. Onge![]() Part three of three. My final goodbye to a friend who recently lost his life to brain cancer.![]() I saw your dead body today. I saw your mother your brother your father cry. Stood back, remembered how to curl in on myself-- origami folded my tear ducts into the shape of your bruised and beaten brain-- refused to admit to myself that the corpse in the box looked anything like the boy I used to know. “Cancer was stealing his youth.” 1 The Catholic Priest wearing robes mottled with red, the coffin in slate grey, and your family donned in black; swirled together, we looked like the somber aftermath of Chernobyl. Father Evan says that this is what ambivalence2 looks like. (He says that you parallel Jesus, the first Christian martyr,3 “the true meaning of Christmas;”4 you were born with a death sentence on your head.5) ((I guess your parents don’t know that you’re an atheist.)) “Do you believe that he will rise?” 6 You are not Lazarus, although I wish you were. I sat in a mausoleum this afternoon. The walls were made of dead bodies in nice suits and nice dresses, damned to lay with closed eyes, with puffy eyes, in coffins for all eternity. They did not allow us to watch your casket get stuffed into the wall with the others. No one watched. Your family left with us. Your last few moments unburied were alone. “Born into a world that would seek and then take his life.” 7 I didn’t get to say one more goodbye before they closed you in on an infinite claustrophobic trip, but I suppose all is well because I didn’t get to say goodbye before your final breath either. I don’t think I would’ve wanted to see you a second time in that padded box anyhow. Your hair was parted wrong, everyone said so. The makeup on you was too think, everyone thought so. The rosary placed in your hands was everything you would not have wanted, everyone (but your mother) knew so. “Your son meant something to me.” 8 Father Evan says that it’s okay that you’re dead now because you’re finally without your human faults and without sin,9 but Kalena and I liked your faults and liked your sins. I do not want to picture you without them. I’d rather picture you swimming through the stars like water, envision you lassoing up asteroids and becoming the meteor’s flaming, falling star tail than imagine you with stiff hands and closed eyes and hair parted too much to the left. There has never been a time when you have not crossed my mind. “Thank you for letting this priest ramble.” 10 _________________________________________________________________________________ 1 “Cancer was stealing his youth.” 2 “Ambivalence.” 3 “The first Christian Martyr.” 4 “Helped us remember what Christmas really means to us.” 5 “Born with a death sentence on his head.” 6 “Do you believe that he will rise?” 7 “Born into a world that would seek and then take his life.” 8 “Your son meant something to me.” 10 “Let this priest ramble.” © 2014 Taylor St. OngeAuthor's Note
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