Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Charles Pépin

see that it’s working. After each speech, poetry reading, or small word, we take a second to meditate and I announce the next speaker. There’s a photo of mom on the coffin in which she’s radiant and we really have the impression, while listening to all of the speeches, that we are speaking truly of her. In the words of a former student, she is a teacher that loved the young more than her subjects, who knew how to pacify, to enrich, and to create laughter. With her best friend, a presence who always did my mom some good, who called when she wasn’t doing well, it’s not so much what she says but simply her voice, nothing but her voice. With her colleague who stood by her for twenty years in the same high school, she was the one who always knew, who knows—everyone has trouble with this type of past tense—the one who

mid-day sun whitens. It’s a marvel. A cemetery so beautiful, it’s troubling. I’ve never seen anything like it. Stuck on a hill in the suburbs of Paris, the cemetery is not enclosed: after the last tombstones, if you climb, you find yourself with your feet in the grass, on the edge of some woods. We wanted a non-religious ceremony because mom had vaguely expressed that desire. My father asked me to run the ceremony because he didn’t feel capable to do it, Mathieu either. It’s a matter structuring the speeches and music from within the small room at the entrance to the cemetery. We meet in front of the coffin and everything is going smoothly. Light coming through the bay windows shines off of the coffin’s handles. While gathering the speakersduring thepreceding days, I was thinking about a sequence and I’m happy to

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