She down the steps through the familiar lawn of the neighbors house on her way home from school but she did not make it all the way home that day. Oddly her mother’s sister, Aunt Georgia, was at the bottom of the steps. This was very odd. Her aunt looked tired and sad. She told her they would wait for her brother and sisters there before going home because her mom was not well. A premonition of doom settled into this thirteen year old girls heart as the time of her siblings arrival ticked by slowly.

That premonition had turned into a nightmare as each child now sat in Sunday clothes in a small room off of a chapel in a funeral home. Her father laid in a casket with a room full of grieving adults on the other side of the door. As her family finally filed into the first row in what looked like a small church her heart lurched in her chest. She knew she saw her father moving in the casket and he was trying to open his mouth to speak to her.

The men in black suits closed the lid of the casket as her mother sobbed. She wanted to scream, “Stop, no!!!”. But she had been warned severely about crying no tears and making no commotion to keep from upsetting her now china doll mother who looked ready to crack. She was cracking too along with her siblings but children were to be seen and not heard.

As they drove in large black cars to a cemetery she did know how to tell them her father had been trying to tell her something. She knew he wanted out of that box and was afraid they were smothering him as they drove. That dread became panic as they lowered him into a gaping six foot whole in the ground and she could no longer stifle the sobs. Was this to be a goodbye to her dear, dear father whom she knew was still breathing? No, it was too heartbreaking, to awful to believe. As they drove away the goodbye was made much more painful by the sight of his mouth moving trying to tell her something.

Years later she found out by an odd set of circumstances that her dear, dear father had taken his own life that day years ago. Was he trying to say he was sorry when she saw his lips move. The now adult knew she would never know, but the sorrow at leaving him that day still haunts her in her waking and sleeping hours were he is buried in her heart. The unheard screams of a thirteen year old girl reman buried there as she limps through life as a result of that final goodbye.