When My Father Died I Learned the Importance of Burial Arrangements

I stood at the foot of my late father’s grave in the deserted cemetary. Dad had just been buried and the last batch of the officiating ministers, who had conducted the burial, as well as others who’d attended the interment, had just trickled out of the cemetary. The sun was bright and scorching. Hot, burning tears rolled down my lean cheeks. Apart from myself, there were three other people beside Dad’s grave. They were the bricklayers erecting a slab on the grave. I watched heavy heartedly as they carried out their assignment, beads of sweat trickling down their backs.

Just before everyone left the cemetary that blazing afternoon, my immediate younger brother, who was five years younger than I was, had looked at me with so much scorn and disdain and ordered:

“Listen, you’ll have to wait behind to supervise the workmen who will put a slab on this grave. Don’t leave here until everything is in place. If you do, you’ll be held responsible for anything that goes wrong.”

Maddening rage had welled up in me. I felt like pouncing on my younger brother and beating the living daylights out of him. The insult and humiliation was simply unbearable. Months back, before fate played a bad one on me and left my finances in ruins, my younger brother wouldn’t have dared to talk to me in that condescending manner. As he spoke, I’d looked at him with eyes that emitted venom. It took all my willpower to control my rage. What else could I have done anyway? If I’d allowed my anger to get the better of me, I would have ended up disrupting Dad’s interment. And that was simply unthinkable!