They came here to give me something, and they set it down so gently.
I have been holding this one since the beginning: through the first standing, the running, the falling off a bicycle at seven that I broke, softly, into a scraped knee rather than something worse. I held them at the wedding, in the swaying, in the leaning against a doorframe at two in the morning.
I hold them now, in this room of dark clothes and folding chairs, though today they are harder to hold. They lean into each other more than usual. A daughter puts her weight against a son and the son takes it, and I take them both, as I always have.
The box at the front is heavier than the person inside it ever was to me. I want to be clear: the one I am no longer holding weighs nothing now. I checked. This is my whole confusion. They keep saying the loss is so heavy, that they can barely carry it, that they woke this morning under a great weight.
I ran my measurement across every one of them and found nothing. No mass. No pull. And yet look: their shoulders round, their heads bow, their knees want the floor. They bend beneath a thing I cannot feel and cannot hold for them. It is the one burden I have never once been able to take.
So I do what I can. I hold the coffee in the paper cups. I hold the flowers, the chairs, the trembling hands. I hold the ones still standing, and I hold, especially, the ones who no longer want to.
I will be under them the whole way home. I will be there tonight when they finally lie down and let go completely, trusting, the way sleepers do, that someone is keeping them from falling.
I am. I always was.
I do not let go.