The mourner

It was a fairly regular day to die when my time eventually came. The world didn’t shake at my passing, as untimely as it may have been, and life continued its march of endless monotony as cold and relentless as ever. The funeral wasn’t much different either. The event, if one could even call it that, was a cheap and inevitably miserable affair, filled with all the pomp and circumstance that you’d expect from a burial on a budget and shrouded in a veil of religious compromise that promised heaven in return for my soul in a sort of non-consensual contract. It was in the middle of discussing this unlawful undertaking between an extremely pious priest and the pitiful amount of mourners who had bothered to show their thinly veiled glee and even muster a crocodile tear or two at the thought of my passing that I realised something. From within that wooden box adorned lovingly with carnations and wilted daisies and furnished with a velvet lining for the comfort of my corpse, I had an epiphany. A thought so philosophical in nature that it could only have come from the wisdom of death, conjured from the recesses of an empty brain. 
Our deaths are not our own. They’re something that happens to everyone else and to one person in particular in this instance. 
I’m sad to say that in the event of my death I had not left my mother much in terms of money nor family. She had some estranged relatives somewhere on the other side of the globe and access to whatever negligible sum made up my life’s savings. But that was all. My guilt was only made worse by the fact that my death seemed to hit her the hardest, a fact which I have never understood being the poster child for unwanted offspring; selfish, ignorant and often unkind. Never the less, it was her that visited that grave every week, caressed that cheap headstone that stuck out like a sore thumb among the marbled monoliths of more dignified memorials and her that watered the funeral flowers with briny tears. I had never witnessed such dedication in my life as that which was bestowed upon me in my death and in furnishing that humble stone with such love, she imposed a value on it, conjuring a currency that I do not know how to spend and fear I will never will. 
To this day I wait for her visits. Though now I am more bone then body, more putrid than person, but still as valuable as the day they lowered that pine box into the earth, carcass swaddled with care and buried with best wishes. I wait for fresh flowers, a kind word and the promise of reconciliation between a scorned mother and a son who left too soon. I wait for my justice, my vendetta and a mission for vengeance gone right. But most of all I wait for soft strides on the ground above. To feel each foot step through the earth, to see the way the oranges and emeralds of autumn leaves make the mourning clothes look dower. So much so that my one faithful mourner is just as out of place as my own headstone and from my home beneath the ground its self I laugh at the irony of our predicament. For as her veils of black lace stick out like my own memorial I realise that in these moments of grief we are one and the same. I may lie dead within the earth but she is as cold and lifeless as I. Two skeletons looking for substance in a world devoid of meaning, watching the earth float by like her skirts, black cotton carried by the wind and drifting across a solemn grave yard like the reaper, leaving behind only flowers and the remnants of a mothers love.