There is a house of glass at the edge of the fields, big as three churches, and inside it men and women weep as though laying kin in the ground. Yet no one is dead. No box, no shroud, no priest. They only hold each other by the doors and shake.
I watched a mother clutch her grown son. She pressed his face the way you press a loaf to know if it is fresh. She did not want to let go of the pressing. And he went, through the door, into the belly of a great pale beast that swallows folk by the hundred and does not chew.
They tell me the beast carries them off, far, faster than a horse can run in a fortnight. To another place. To live. So it is not death. It only wears death's clothes.
But I have said my own farewells at the road's turning, when a brother went to find work and the winter was long between us. You do not know, when you loose a man's arm, whether you loose it for a season or forever. The parting feels the same in the chest either way. The good Lord did not make our love clever enough to tell the difference.
So they are right to weep.
A goodbye is a small burial you do not yet know the size of.