I'm sitting alone in this house, but for the sleeping company of the dog and the cat. Quieter somehow with the soft music on than the sound of the silence itself. I know that's because my mind is talking this and talking that, and won't shut up. The music is the leveller. Sometimes the old questions re-surface and I welcome them; but not tonight. What's the purpose? Will I live to see the balance of all things become so disjointed; recovery is impossible? Is my daughter generally hopeful? Happy?
Uneasy; I'm bent to dwell upon my work and my life as a funeral director because my work is my life and vice-versa. How can it not be, it's so intimately personal. And then a thought forms from outside the windowpane as I watch the snow fall. Thousands upon thousands of flakes and no two are alike they say. Must be billions in this snowfall alone. How can that be? Some strange anomaly that makes one like this and one like that. Some slight alteration in which this one freezes in its perfection while another - equally perfect, fuses onto the first... and again... and again... covering up the season that went before, in fragile chains of embrace; leaving white. The “light" of an evening's landscape.
I open the front door. The quiet of it all; a strange invasion of calm, muffling up the sounds of the wind that brings it and the growl of a car engine somewhere, warming itself so it can escape. But I'm motionless watching it descend. I don't move. I don't escape. For an instant I wonder something about mortality and connectedness, and before another kamikaze flake can enter the warmth of the house, I shut the door.
I imagine the snow as stars, supernova's spraying their mass throughout the neighbourhood. Billions of soft subtle explosions settling themselves on the yard, the side of the tree, the birdbath and steps. And it strikes me how brilliant these bright deaths must be to sculpt this panoramic scene of winter perfection – and then, again, there it is once more – some kind of connection I can feel, for living with all of the catastrophic explosions of lives I've taken part in. The panorama of all the lives I've served allowing the unbroken view; each as meaningful and beautiful as the snowflakes constructing themselves on mass outside my window. Each life leaving their seasons behind for others to delight in and remark after the dark days have gone... “remember when..."
And there are literally thousands of these people who have laughed out stories, cried out stories, squeezed them out through hugs; for each other, and for me who has served them. The brilliant one-of-a-kind lives that I have merely touched for a brief and fleeting moment, like a snowflake on a cheek, that turns to tears.
And each year, their memories return. And mostly in wintertime, when the snow is deep and profoundly still. All the names. All the memories. All the stories. My own too. My mother. My father. My boyhood friend. They spread themselves out before me on such a night as this. In a blanket of white that somehow calls me to slip under it's strange and warm covering, like all of the lives that went before me did. They are perfectly imperfect and yet, as bright and brilliant as the snowflakes that keep falling now as I write this down.
SNOWFALL 
