I watched as the dirt piled on my small casket. The miniature wooden box to be the only home my body would know. My first and last residence; I went straight from my mother's arms into its embrace.
It was a bright autumn day -- only the crisp chill in the air, and the scent of decaying leaves betraying the season. It was the kind of day that should cheer the spirit; the kind of day for a boy to jump in a pile of leaves and laugh, carelessly.
My brother might have done just that, if it were a different day. Today, dressed as formally as a three-year-old can be, he sat on my mother's lap kicking his legs up and down as he listened impatiently to the priest explain away the unexplainable; describing a god who calls young children home too soon; claiming a divine plan with a hidden wisdom.
From the very beginning, I found I could inhabit certain creatures in order to spy more closely on the world. Otherwise, with a presence as diffuse as the light filling a room, I could only perceive events remotely. Today I was able to make use of a small chickadee perched in a tree not far from the freshly dug hole. Hopping around from branch to branch, chirping innocently, I was unnoticed by all. Later I would come to understand the limits and possibilities of these possessions, but early on I was drawn to birds, especially the sensation of flight.
Too young, an infant once in body and now in soul, I took in the sad gathering not completely aware of its significance, still unsure of my place in it all. I watched a family that I had never known. In time, I would come to know them, but not in the way I should have.
My father, a thin man in a too-baggy black suit, sat expressionless, emotionless. His hazel eyes seemed empty, betraying the ill-defined sense of sadness that pricked his heart. The vacant stare reflecting the uncertainty of what it was he'd lost. To him, I was just an expectation, a promise, an opportunity, a day dream; but never a person.
My mother leaned her head of raven-black hair on my father's shoulder, her lip trembling, her eyes pressed shut -- an expression of utter sadness that was my unwelcome greeting to this world, and the next. She held my brother's small hand tightly, as if he might escape her too. Her eyes opened briefly, red and sore from crying, to catch a glimpse of the small box; only able to drink in the scene in small doses. We had been connected for nine months, our lives intimately woven together, although she didn't know anything more about me than my father. She would recover and move on, as the living always do and should, but it would take time.
I know now that souls don't age. I know that apart from the body we exist in a kind of limbo, at least for a time. We don't grow as a body might. Yet souls can learn, do gain wisdom gradually. Over the course of years, we watch and we feel and we become aware. The feelings aren't always pleasant, and the awareness never total, but we do have a role to play in the physical world, just not one we've asked for or wanted.
This, my first lesson, was not a happy one. To see the only affect my physical life would have on my family was not comforting. I watched from above, knowing but not yet recognizing the faces that I should have grown to love over time. My father, my mother, and my brother listening to the parish priest mouth the last rites of passage -- my body's first, last and only journey.
Eventually, a marker would be added to the small grave in upstate New York, and only then did I recognize my name as Michael.
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