The lonely coffin

One other image from the memorial today in Gisozi sticks with me: a coffin, left alone in one of the museum rooms. I could see half of it through the glass door. It had been left alone, all the people that arrived with it taking their chairs around the program, or heading down to the mass grave site, where that coffin, and the others I’d seen come in on trucks packed with people, would be buried during the ceremony.

The image of an abandoned coffin has been stuck in my head for years. Six years ago, a wonderful friend whom I’d known only a short time died very suddenly. Several of us who knew him trekked up to his hometown, in rural Pennsylvania, for his funeral. I hadn’t been to a funeral since I was a kid, and I think I was protected from the graveside services then. At Zac’s funeral, his parents said their goodbyes to the coffin, got in their car, and left. I suddenly thought that that must be the hardest thing a person ever does, lay a hand on a coffin and walk away, leaving them there. This is the image that made me really understand what death is.

So I knew, when my great grandfather died, that leaving the coffin would probably be the hardest part. I don’t know how we did it, my sister and I, but we managed to. It’s what makes something feel like an ending, the reason I know he is gone, because I left him there. Often, I wonder if he’s lonely.

He died a year ago today. I was traveling to spend Passover with my best friend and her husband’s family–the were living abroad–and when we arrived, I got a call that my great grandfather had died. I think I cried a little bit, and then I had to go to Seder.

This year, thinking about my great grandfather, I cried a bit, and then I went to the memorial. I never really dealt with the death, I don’t think, and I had always thought that today would be a good time, one year later. I didn’t imagine I’d be here…where thinking about him feels strange. It’s such a private loss, without any context, in a place where tragedy is massive, on a day when marking it is so public. But when I saw that coffin by itself…

This coffin, the people inside of it, they haven’t been buried for 14 years. For so long, survivors didn’t know where their family members’ bones were. Only as perpetrators have confessed, as gacaca has gone on, I’m told, have many survivors finally found their sisters, their mothers, their husbands. Now, they can bring coffins here, bury them properly, know where they are.

I didn’t understand a lot about today, but I had some idea what that must mean.