How Not To Need Resurrection

A couple times a week we have picnics at our local cemetery. After we eat I watch the girls play happily and listen to Sophia read the tombstones to everyone while she wonders aloud how they died and who leaves them flowers and such.

The last time we went I had packed a picnic lunch and when I picked up J and V from preschool I asked where they wanted to picnic - on our front lawn or at the cemetery? They chanted the whole way there, "Ce-me-tar-y! Ce-me-tar-y!"

 

 

 

 

 

How Not to Need Resurrection

Children like to play at death—
they hold their breath,
and cross their arms and shut their eyes
until they forget to be dead; then rise
from their nest of pillows and play instead
at being lost or married,
as if their state was mutable, as if, like water
they could flow or freeze or climb without a ladder
into the heavens then drop back down—
they are the first resurrectionists, they alone
understand the trick is not to try,
that once you believe in death, you must surely die.

--Michalle Gould