Project Diary: impossible notes through impossible sadness

The mortuary chapel in Richmond is woody, rectangular and dark. It has a feel of the sacred rare in these places. There are ushers in white gloves from the Christian Body Life Fellowship, which is out of Vacaville. Before the service begins, I follow two women I assume are former teachers of the victim up the long aisle to the coffin to pay my respects to the murdered seventeen-year-old. We stair down at the corpse in emptiness. We are adult and clueless. He was very thin. He had a thin mustache and a small patch of hair on his chin. He’s wearing a bright, checkered shirt and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap, askew on his head. There are many strands of wooden beads laid across his chest. I think one of them is a rosary, and indeed later, a close friend of his reads an impressive poem, written in the days after the murder, in which he mentions the rosary he carried. Or possibly wore. I see the victim's father as the family enters the chapel. He is holding hands with his one living son, a tall, thin young man, a year or so older than the victim. The father looks dignified and strong in a navy suit. There is a long, long procession of family, young and very old, hail and infirm, stoic and openly grieving. Near the end of the entry of the family I see two teenagers who look like they might be brothers, but they might be cousins, young men, standing tall, walking close together hand-in-hand. It’s really beautiful. Today’s preacher is younger than usual. He looks to be in his thirties. Before he preaches the usual call for an end to the killing, a cousin of the deceased, who tells us he is fifty years old, sings from the pulpit a beautiful, a cappella “Our Father.” He reaches impossible notes through impossible sadness. His singing makes you feel the presence of holiness. During the service, pictures of the young victim flash across a large screen over the coffin. The slide show is billed as a Wilson & Kratzer Production. Wilson & Kratzer is the funeral home. Lots of pictures of the victim smiling, flexing, just being a kid. Family pictures, baby pictures. One, which seems to be on the screen every time I look up, appears to be the victim and his brother as toddlers, stepping out of a doorway, smiling and shirtless on a summer morning. One of them, I imagine it is the victim, has a small bandage on his forehead.