THE VISIT

A son visits his father's grave and then leaves.

I stood there at the graveside, imagining what it had been like for the others, who had been allowed to attend my father’s funeral. For a reason which I understood perfectly I was told my presence would be a distraction, whatever that meant. I had been in effect black-balled. Ostracized. Probably in the form of a permanent exile.

As I felt the biting cold of an early wintry dawn, it was the appropriate season for me to linger here for the last time, before I left the country for good. I was helping them out. I had already taken on a new persona, changing my appearance and name.

I realized I was wasting time, thinking of the others. What they did not know was I was with someone else, whom they would never meet. I was going to protect my partner from prying questions or snide remarks, such as the ones I had had to endure all my life. He was waiting for me in a distant place, where we were already making a home for ourselves.

Winter is the ending of the year, and for me symbolized the death of the past. I was glad I was here to witness the event, of which I was the only participant. No fanfares. No high-sounding speeches. No adoring crowds. Just one person to savour the irony of this moment.

Not even the God of those buried in this churchyard was rousing me into even a razor-thin belief which might conceivably destroy my hatred of all the religion had inflicted on me. My family and community had been instructed to give me the chance to recant and, if I refused, then I was to be banished from their midst as an apostate.

The entire process seemed so ridiculous to me, I had even said so at the extraordinary meeting, to which my father one evening had called or been forced to call the elders of the church, in order to discuss my “grievous sin”, which I saw as my life, lived out in integrity without the need to cover it up with a lie.The word they used for my punishment was “excommunication”. It sounded very much like the workings of the Catholic Church, another of those oppressive institutions, which expected total obedience to an outmoded creed.

Being a disappointment to your father is no big deal, when he is also one to you. You can live with the perception, or at least you can just ignore it and move on. He had frankly become irrelevant to me.

As I looked at the headstone of the one who had disowned me as his son, I made my own whispered declaration: “Father, since you lie there, having once made the decision to throw me out, I now consign you to the earth, never to rest for eternity, if there is such a thing. I appoint myself as a priest of the ungodly community, which despises your religion. You made me this way. And now I declare I have no father. You are a stranger to me, as you become just a collection of bones, and one day those, who remember you, will join you, and you will not be known by later generations. You will be forgotten.”

I stopped talking and listened. Thinking there might be a reply from somewhere, even from on high, but I was lucky although perhaps a little let down. Surely the old codger would make some disparaging boom of a comment from out of the grave. But no, there was only total, beautiful silence. I relished it. I tasted the air, rich with the intoxicating fragrance of grass, wet with dew. I heard the twittering chorus of birdsong, which day by day had always pierced the stillness, and also enhanced it. I loved this place, as for a short lapse into daydreaming I forgot why I had come.

Then the time for departing had come. I mean, in the sense of leaving behind everything which had been my unwelcome past. I walked out of the churchyard through the lychgate, knowing that I would never return, unless in a nightmare.

I said goodbye to my sister, who was waiting outside, and got into my car and drove away.