Hal⋅le⋅lu⋅jah.

My neck is so sore I can barely move it. I can't think what I did, except yesterday was one of those days where I couldn't find the "off-switch." I had to bail halfway through Sacrament before the crying literally became disruptive. Even as the day wore on at home with my family, there was so much leaky, rapidfire-drippo public weeping that I had to keep going up to my room where I could sob the real sobs. Which were apparently so bad that I pulled something. (Ever the athlete!!! Someone is rolling in his grave right about now.)

I couldn't even dismiss it as PMS. It was just memories: the fear of losing them, the bittersweetness of reliving them. The pain of knowing there can be no more. This happens every once in awhile.

I once heard that the memory-storing part of your brain doesn't acknowledge passage of time, so it is capable of processing a memory like it's in real-time. And yesterday, I got to relive Kirsten On Funeral Day.

I remember more about that day than I do about the blur of days after and before it. I remember sitting with his family in the front of the chapel and hanging my head. I remember there being talking. To me, over me, and on behalf of me. Words were spoken in the private gathering after everyone else had been moved to the chapel, and it was just our final prayer with them as one big family. But my memory stored only silence.

The muted footage my mind retained from that horrible day, it's like the Super8 silent home movies my grandparents took of my mom and uncle when they were wee little. One Christmas, I had them digitally formatted and I dubbed music onto them. I racked my brain to find the right music to fit the footage. I had to play it all over and over in silence until I found the right sound to accompany it.

I mostly remember what I could see from that day, framed like pictures on the wall of my mind. Over the mantle of that day hangs the image of that long, two-lane rural road that stretches uninterrupted through the fields and farmland Rbf and I looked at from the sky the last time I had been to that town. That was the last time he would take the plane up before August 7th, and I fell in love with those big, green, living, growing fields from my seat in the sky. This road seemed to cut through those fields for miles and miles.

And for whatever reason, my most vivid memory of that day is the image of all the oncoming traffic pulled off to the side of the road while we passed. All the farm trucks in the oncoming lane, sitting still to watch as we crept past with three of their own. Stopping the middle of their sunny, sweaty Tuesday to sit silently in the ditch to show their respect. They all knew who it was, what had happened. And I just sat in my seat and hung my head in all that quiet, and I will never, ever forget it.

This memory plays quietly on a loop while my mind auditions soundbytes to go back and fill in that memory. Today, Kelly gave me a CD containing the song Hallelujah, a title coating the haunting, sad music in irony. The song threw me back to the long road in Rupert, Idaho and the three hearses we followed. All around us was peace, growth, and vitality in all those green fields, of life and health and hard work - lined up along the edge of that paved road. And it was contradicted by the horror and sadness, the death, the silence that pressed on in the opposite direction. I found the song telling me the story of that day. It was pretty, and and poetic, and it hurt like a bitch.

The song was performed recently for those suffering indescribably in Haiti. For all the pain God has hand-picked for me to have to understand, I can't even wrap my mind around their own mental footage. Nothing can do it justice. From my broken heart to theirs, God bless.