The Second Funeral
"Some grief doesn't belong to a single day. It buries you slowly, each year a little deeper."
⸻
The photo from the room that wasn't there stayed on my desk for three days.
I tried to throw it away. More than once.
First, I dropped it in the trash can.
Later, I found it folded inside my wallet.
The next day, it was tucked between the pages of Her Name Was Yesterday, even though I hadn't touched that book in months.
Every time I turned away from it, it came back—quietly, persistently.
Not like a haunting.
Like a reminder.
⸻
On the fourth day, I found an envelope in my mailbox.
No stamp.
No return address.
Just my name in ink that shimmered slightly when held to the light.
Inside was a single black card. Simple. Elegant. Final.
You are invited to the memorial service of
Elara Morrin
"For the ones who forgot, and the ones who never did."
Date: Tomorrow
Location: Chapel of the Silent Bell
My hands shook as I read it.
The name scratched something inside me.
A place beneath memory.
The kind of recognition that doesn't come from thought, but from ache.
I searched online.
Nothing.
No chapel by that name.
No listing for any Elara Morrin funeral.
No record of the invitation anywhere.
I called ten churches in the city.
None had heard of it.
But somehow, I knew exactly where it was.
Because I'd been there.
Not in waking life.
But in a dream.
A chapel with no cross, no hymns, no stained glass—
Just a crumbling bell tower, the bell long ago shattered.
⸻
I went.
Of course I went.
Even though I didn't know what I'd find.
Even though some part of me already did.
⸻
The sky that morning was gray in a way that didn't feel like weather.
It felt like memory.
The color of old photographs.
Of long pauses.
Of grief that had forgotten how to speak.
The chapel stood at the edge of the city, past the overgrown cemetery I hadn't visited in years.
It looked abandoned from the outside.
But the door was unlocked.
The hinges didn't creak.
They sighed.
⸻
Inside, the silence was thick.
The kind that swallows footsteps.
And then I saw her.
Not Elara.
Her mother.
Or someone wearing the face of the woman I used to watch from a distance, never brave enough to speak to.
She was older now, and not.
Like someone caught between decades.
She turned as I entered.
Her eyes locked onto mine.
"You made it," she said softly, as if we'd spoken just yesterday.
"I… I don't remember you."
She smiled the saddest smile I've ever seen.
"That's alright," she whispered. "She remembered you enough for both."
⸻
There were no other guests.
No priest.
No music.
No candles.
Only a coffin at the center of the chapel.
Closed.
Unmarked.
A thing that demanded reverence without explanation.
I stepped toward it.
Not out of curiosity.
Out of gravity.
Like something inside it was calling the part of me I'd forgotten how to be.
⸻
I expected a name.
I expected flowers. A photograph. Anything.
Instead, I found my own reflection in the polished wood.
Only it wasn't me.
Not this me.
It was the boy.
The one I see in mirrors when I'm too tired to lie to myself.
Younger. Softer. Scared.
And he was crying.
⸻
"She's not in there," I said quietly.
The woman nodded.
"No," she agreed.
"Then why…?"
She looked at me for a long time. Long enough that the silence became unbearable.
Then she said:
"Because you are."
⸻
The words didn't make sense.
Not logically.
But grief doesn't speak logic.
It speaks loss.
It speaks in echoes and half-buried truths.
"Parts of you," she continued gently, "that you buried long ago.
Parts she held onto until you were ready to come back."
I stepped away from the coffin.
My pulse was thunder in my ears.
"I didn't ask her to do that," I said, voice breaking.
"No," she said. "You begged her to."
⸻
Then I saw it.
On the lid of the coffin: a key.
Brass. Ornate. Worn smooth at the edges, as if handled by hands that once trembled.
I picked it up.
It was warm.
Like skin.
⸻
As I turned to leave, she stopped me.
Slipped an envelope into my hand.
Inside, a letter.
Elara's handwriting.
I knew it instantly.
Every curve, every deliberate loop in the lowercase e, the way she made her capital L curl like a question mark.
"You asked me to hold the part of you that still loved.
I did.
But it's heavy now.
It's breaking me.
Please take it back."
"Don't come find me.
Remember me.
That's enough."
⸻
I didn't cry.
Not then.
Grief is patient.
It waits for you to open the right door.
But I knew it was coming.
Not for her.
For me.
For the boy in the coffin.
For the part of me she protected.
The part I abandoned because I was afraid of what I might remember.
⸻
That night, I opened my journal.
A new page had been added.
I didn't write it.
Didn't own the ink.
Didn't remember touching the paper.
But there it was:
A sketch of the coffin.
Open this time.
Inside:
A small boy curled up, asleep.
Holding a folded paper heart in his hands.
Above it, in handwriting I didn't recognize but somehow understood—
One word:
"Yours."