I know I am at my first funeral. But whose, I don’t know. Though I can’t tell my age, I know I am old enough to understand and absorb the sadness. I am shrouded by women with blood for tears, and men who are bleeding sweat. The old woman who weaves in and out of my dreams is here again, her white head rag a halo I follow above a dark plain. I reach out to her because I don’t know anyone else there to hold on to. She calms me with a single gaze, says nothing, only grabs my hand to lead me through the thickness. She knows I want to get closer to the heart no longer beating. She knows I want to see inside, both the coffin and the heart.

I want to ask her, “Who are you?” More importantly, “Who am I?” I want to know why visions of the life I may one day live trickle into dreams I share with my mothers. I want to know why the old woman never speaks. I want to know when the coffin carried will be mine, because if I have died then at least I will know I once lived.

This old woman weaves her way in and out of my dreams, with intensity more than frequency. Her face is sometimes blurred, sometimes she is headless and other times she is a talking head. The white rag always appears before her face. Sometimes she is younger, but she always comes as an elder. She rarely comes and when she does, she rarely stays, but still I wonder what she means to me.

The pallbearers ease their load into a hearse with no riders, except for one: a mother who has fainted from grief. The police department has sent cars to lead a processional to the burial, but I sense their presence is not needed or wanted on this side of town. Black people not part of the funeral furrow the street like a storm, feeling a part of others’ sadness today because they don’t know about their own tomorrow. We follow the parade of mourners from the church down a street called Cottage Grove; the black hearse leads us down the middle of the street. With my back turned to the mourners I am able to see color again. The buildings and people who live above them shine with the brightness of a shantytown. We walk past used furniture shops with their names weathered away from wooden signs, past chicken and fish joints that we can smell blocks before and after. The old woman leads me to the front of the crowd entering a cement-gated cemetery stretching several blocks, carries me really, like I am weightless, without gravity, in utero. When in my dream we push through the thick of bodies and heat to view a coffin opened for one last, final time, I look inside and still cannot see who it holds.