My Eulogy

As her epitaph she requested four photographs
Yellow, blue, pink and green. Nadda else.
Vanity.
The only beauty she wanted shown.
For on gravestones who can truly see, through a few choice words, the soul beneath it?
Who can see beyond the cement?
So why not show something beautiful?
Or at least the only time she was beautiful in her eyes?

Four photographs of youth, thick black lips and dark eyeliner.
She was unwilling to show the rotting, decomposing regret of her life.
She was unwilling to tell, in a few choice words, how her partner was an adulterer,
how her children flew the nest, how her mother died when she was twenty-one,
the only true relatives she had.

Four photographs that let you observe the true sadness of her eyes.
Four photos that as a writer would be the only way to expose her soul.
One whom could bare all on a blanket of posies, planted six-feet above her.
The tears wept are wept for a seventeen year old, at a time in her life when vanity mattered.
This was a time when children and cars and bills and the dress she wore on her wedding day paid no relevance.

A hazy dream, the shadows of a nightmare beautifully painted in a captured image
and when the gravestone wears away and falls, when mother nature pulls her body from the ground
there will be no choice words that she will miss,
only a face, only an image, of a girl no longer known.
Those who knew her lay in pastures beside her.

Rest in peace Mother May,
the Lord is with thee.