Lydia's Emotion story

So I can't figure out how to add contributing writers (someone help please?). But in the meantime here's a wicked awesome piece of writing from Lydia.

The faces around me were sunken, some suffering with lack of sleep, all holding back tears. No one ever knew what to say except “I’m so sorry.”

I had gone up to the coffin several times over the course of the morning, so the shock was wearing off. Out of the room filled with a mix of children, elderly and thirty-something mourners, I was by far the strongest willed.

A twenty-nine year-old father of two broke down on my shoulder, while other men of the same age took steps back from the scene. They were unsure of how to handle it. They were unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry,” was all that came to mind.

They were sorry they were here, they were sorry they had not been around. They were sorry they didn’t know how he had been doing. They were sorry we were so young. Most were sorry that they did not know what to say. Everyone was sorry for my loss.

As I walked another broken man up between aisles of people too young to weep so loudly, I grew steeled. I realized then that I had not cried once, not once since my mother called to say they had found him dead. I had not been shaken when I made the obligatory phone calls to let friends know that he had passed away. I had been more concerned for others, and ready to comfort those that I saw in the days leading up to the funeral.

Looking over to his mother, whose tears had dried overnight, I saw her quietly consoling someone as I was doing now. She had been the first to greet me in the mid-morning as the dark stained doors of the funeral home. We had walked up the aisle past reams of donated flowers, ribbons and ferns, to view the casket. All the while, she chatted like only a mother could about what a good job they had done on his makeup and how he had gained weight in jail and how she was glad he had died at home.

Still, as I had been doing, she was walking the young or the nervous visitors up to the coffin to see her son. You could tell who was too scared to see him by the way they stole glances toward the back of the room and searched the faces of those walking back toward the door. As if they could catch a reflection left over in eyes that had viewed the dead body, they looked cheated when they could not find it. They stole a glance back at the coffin, at the floor, at their hands… anywhere they could contemplate their grief, and then; they looked at me.