eulogy 3
He came from a house of silence,
where love had a curfew
and every prayer was punishment.
His mother, a ghost in her own skin,
chasing warmth through other beds,
calling it freedom while her sons
learned what abandonment sounded like
when doors slammed in their faces.
Dad was the preacher of control,
a prophet of hollow men.
He taught his boy to swallow pain,
to laugh when he bled,
to call loneliness “discipline.”
He spoke of heaven,
but built his altar from shame—
a cracked Bible, a bottle,
the gospel of don’t cry, boy.
When the new wife came,
she wore sin like perfume.
They passed lust like communion,
called it enlightenment,
and told him this was what being a man meant.
He mistook corruption for closeness,
and the rot took root deep.
The brother came and went
like a storm that never watered the ground.
He needed, always needed,
and when there was nothing left to take,
he vanished—
until death became a family reunion.
And oh, how they gathered.
Polished shoes. Folded hands.
The ones who never stayed
suddenly couldn’t leave.
They wept for the crowd,
for the mirror of their guilt.
They spoke his name
like they’d earned the right.
They blamed the widow,
called her the wound instead of the witness.
But the earth knows better.
The soil doesn’t lie.
It took him gently,
the way none of them ever did.
Somewhere beneath their footsteps,
he finally stopped reaching
for their hollow love.
Then she came—
the ghost who taught him hunger,
perfume thick with lies,
eyes dry as dust.
She leaned close,
asked if I really loved him.
And in that question,
I saw the truth he carried his whole life:
he had been chasing her shadow,
a woman who would never stay,
and I was only the echo,
the next in line
to try to hold what she had taught him to break.
And yet, beneath the stones and sorrow,
he whispers still—
through the wind in the trees,
through hollowed-out rooms of my chest.
He teaches me how to carry grief like fire,
how to love what the world refuses to hold.
Even in death,
he is more alive than the ones who claimed him,
more real than their prayers,
more gentle than the hands that should have stayed.
I listen.
I remember.
He is not theirs to mourn.
He is the echo of everything unbroken,
the shadow that refuses to vanish,
the dark light that remains.
7:13
Chloe