A Proper Burial

It was way before we could put his body in the coffin when I saw my father sitting on his feet beside a stretcher with a white body bag on top. The sun shone brutally and he was wearing a white button-down shirt, using his hand to block his face while he cried quietly. I could see his beard, which had fully gone white before reaching the age of fifty. As I moved closer and closer I saw my cousin's left foot sticking out of the body bag. It was bloated and yellow and I thought, "That's an image I will never forget!"
- "Dad."
He looked up at me. "yes." His eyes were red.
- "When we bury someone, ... don't we put the corpse in the grave?" I asked.
- "Yes." He replied shortly and, again, hid his face behind his hand.
This answer puzzled me deeply. At that time, I was almost nine years old and I was very dumb. When I look back, I realize that the whole time we were in that cemetery, I was being either puzzled or stupid. And, I'll tell you why.
At first upon entering that cemetery I was puzzled, because it was very far from the place I thought we were supposed to actually bury Sean. I was constantly wondering as to why we were there. After that, I was really stupid, because as soon as the car pulled up, I got off and took it upon myself to participate in the first ongoing burial within my periphery.
There were many tall trees in that cemetery and plants had grown out of the earth wherever possible. It was crowded around that grave. Most people were crying, especially a young woman who was screaming hard and pulling her hair out. as to my position on this very dire situation, I was valiantly pushing people aside in order to move closer to the grave and everyone I passed looked at me with the utmost confusion. At that moment I did not know the reason. I just got to my intended position and stood waiting with the others. After a long period of standing beside people I did not know, while both being totally baffled, which was rooted in the complete wrongness of my possession, and trying as hard as a nine-year-old could to look sad while absolutely feeling nothing, it was finally over. Everyone dispersed and someone carried the young woman to a car, and I just stood there alone feeling every irrelevant emotion possible. In retrospect, that was perhaps the stupidest thirty minutes of my life.
I looked around, there was no stranger and I was the only one at that grave. As I looked for a familiar face I saw my father crying beside a white body bag. Immediately then, I was puzzled, which led to the question about not burying the corpse. I was so dumb that even then I didn't realize what was going on. It took me ten minutes to finally discover, with my incapable brain, that we were only there to wash the corpse. Because my cousin had died in a terrible car accident, parts of his brain had slipped where they were not supposed to be, and a simple village establishment could not clean up something like that, hence the city cemetery. I didn't see this myself as I was only nine, but I had heard people talk about it. But soon stupidity and confusion gave way to heart breaking sadness.
My aunt didn't know much about it. They had told her that her son had been seriously injured in an accident to soften the blow, so when she arrived to the cemetery, she screamed so hard that I could see every hair on my father's body stand up. My poor father. He had to face his sister with only her son's dead body to show for. The moment she saw my father she fell in his arms. She cried so much and for so long. Her sadness was so deep and her tears were so abundant that I thought she bore all the sorrows in world on her chest.
I don't know what happened when my aunt went in there to see his son, probably for the last time, but I guess it wasn't good; I realized that from my father's facial expression which got worse and worse and when she came out she returned immediately to her place in my father's arms.
After a while, the body was done and my father, whose continuous efforts to calm his sister had proved in vain, ushered her into the car and we drove to the village, where Sean was supposed to be buried.
There, we were a bit early for the burial, so my brother and I went to our grandparent's house to take a nap. We had been on the way all night and we could use some sleep. The two of us lay down and before I know it, I was sleep.
I woke up. My brother had left and no one was in the house. I put on my shoes as fast as I could and ran toward the cemetery, but it seemed that I was late. He was already buried and everyone was on their way back. I was awake and stupid for the beginning but I slept through the ending. I felt so interrupted. The only thing I could gather was something I heard from two women leaving the funeral: "Apparently Sean's brother is away on a trip and no one has the guts the tell him. I can't imagine what happens when he returns and sees this!"