The Lonely Funeral
Sam Rasnake

       ‘‘The Lonely Funeral” project [the Netherlands]
        will provide a civil servant and a poet for the
        committal service if the deceased has no one to
        take charge or attend.
                    —Upworthy, storytelling website


No one is buried alone

If there’s no family
or friends or lover
no one to acknowledge
a life has been lived—to say
someone breathed walked spoke
among us—to say the dead was known
and will be missed

no one to list successes endeavors
something—no matter how small or
great—even failures can work given
the right setting—a joke maybe
or beautiful anecdote—and
if there’s no one to say
the dead was loved

then

a civil servant is sent to
have someone official—an authorized
sendoff—isn’t that in some way what we
all want—words spoken even though
no one will remember—no
one will care

and

a poet as well who will write
a poem to read as eulogy—and
since nothing is really known
about the dead

the words must be flowers & wind
colors of the sky blended—there
must be rain & fence & pigs
chickens & herds of cattle & goats
in the poem—a path someone is walking
trees & fields of wheat—a stream
will always be flowing in the verse
bustards & cuckoos &
geese against clouds
crows of course

leaving behind a box
a name
a body in the ground
remembered in this poem
with these words
spoken to the night saying

No one is buried alone …

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Sam Rasnake’s Comments

I discovered an article about the government in the Netherlands providing a burial service for those who had no friends or family—as well as commissioning a poet to write a poem as a eulogy, to be read at the service. This stirred many feelings in me. While I was applauding the fact that a bureaucracy would care about the lone individual, I felt the isolation and loneliness of those who have no one. Could the same effort not be extended somehow to the living? Somewhere in that mix I began to write “The Lonely Funeral.”

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