In youth, the fragile greening period started with the shoots of dating, and the eventual flowering of marriage. After marriage, the delicate green evolved into the more subtle color true blue. In this time appeared her own blue eyes, more somber navy blue clothing, and the grey blue smoke of sophistication, the cigarettes she now smoked. Much later, as rain falling, drops of red soaked into the canvas being painted. Red was the coughing and wheezing from the cigarettes, and the red x she saw on the pack as she threw them into the crimson trash can and quit. She was twenty-seven years old. She knew to the minute and the day this happened, her son’s second birthday, at 7 o’Clock in the evening. Thirty-five years later she became ill.
The beginning was a palette of white; the white sheets of the hospital bed; the white walls of that room; and her white pallid face. After she died the color was gold; the gold walls of the funeral home; the gold flecked rugs on the floor; and the multitude of gold flowers sent by the people who loved her.
At the funeral all was black; shiny black hair touched with grey, splayed against a satin pillow; the glossy black hearse That carried her cancer ridden body to its final resting place; blackened skies that cried huge tears along with the rest of the mourners; and the black suit that the minister wore.
At the brown grave site, people gathered in groups, a mourning flock of geese. The minister stood to read the eulogy. What could he possibly say about a person who had lived sixty-two years and was now a shadowy dream? His colorless voice droned on, a bee buzzing in the air. He read, “it’s not what you give, but what you share, for the gift without the giver is bare. He who feeds Me, feeds three--himself, his hungry neighbor and Me.” Then, as the minister neared the end of the eulogy, with the words, “You will always be remembered, every time we see someone with shiny black hair, it will remind us of you,” an ebony bird perched on a nearby bush. It cocked its head as if it were listening, and with a loud caw rose into the grey air, hovering for just a moment, and was gone.
The mourners became a luminous cloud, suddenly filled with peace. The minister, almost as if in surprise, muttered, “Rest in peace, my ah, um, child!”
Minutes later the rain stopped. The sky became a palette of colors every hue of the rainbow.