Left of Center...

It's like I'm watching all of this on a documentary of someone's else's experience of death. Not my own. Not my own, at all. I sat in my dad's humongous Ford F-15o truck that he had no business taking with him to Belgium. In the rear-view mirror I could see the funeral home attendants loading the pristine wooden casket into the back of the hearse. It felt wrong at the time to turn my head around and look at the scene directly, so I just continued observing through the mirror. All the while Vertical Horizon's new song "I'm Still Here" played on the Armed Forces Network Radio. Very praiseworthy is the soundtrack of my life.

All the way to the funeral home, I could see the casket through the rear, curtained window of the hearse while my dad and I followed. I could only think for the entire ride, "That's not her in there anyway. It's only a shell of her. It was just her body. The real her, well, she's in here with me, telling my dad from the back seat how to drive."