For Every Missing Shade

Entry 47

I got woken up by my dad, put on the same suit as before, and went out the door.

I found my assigned seat in the front of the church. I sat down in my pew as the procession began. Some of her foster siblings and old school friends helped carry her casket to the front. I could feel their eyesight on me as they turned to sit down, but for some reason I couldn't look them in the eyes. I didn't look up at all, actually, until the priest started talking.

He talked for a while, followed by her parents who talked for a while, followed by me.

I walked up to the lectern and fixed my one typed page, followed by five pages out of Emma's notebook.

"Hi," I began, my voice trembling terribly. "My name is Israel Taylor. To many of you, I'm sure that I'm just a story about a boy who fell in love with a girl. And I'm okay with that. Because, honestly, if all I was ever known for was complimenting this amazing girl's life, then I'm the luckiest man alive."

People started crying. I started crying. What's different.

"Emma was a light that entered my life and refused to leave. She made each day of mine brighter, each moment happier, and each joke funnier. She was, without a doubt, the most wonderful person I've ever met. So wonderful, in fact, that I struggled to write this speech ever since I was told I would be saying it.

"It wasn't hard because I didn't know what to say; it was hard because I had a thousand things I wanted to say. It took me until midnight last night to come up with it. I tried to figure it out myself, but I couldn't. How could someone come up with a ten-minute speech to adequately represent everything she was?"

The question sounded rhetorical, but I wanted an answer.

"At midnight, I walked over to a notebook that she left me and found something that, I think, represents her time on Earth better than I ever could. Keep with me because it's a little long.

"The title is To Fill a Bucket. Written by Emma McKenzie.

I was woken up one morning by the sunrise glowing through my window. It was still very dark, but I couldn't fall asleep no matter how much I convinced myself that I wanted to. After realizing my body wasn't going to give in to sleep, I settled for a cup of coffee.

I lived in a small community, a group of houses spanning a beach on the northern tip of the East Coast. Every morning I would sit out on my porch and listen to the waves crash on the beach. This morning, other than the time of day, was no different.

The sun was just beginning to rise as I poured coffee into my cup, but out of the corner of my eye I saw someone awake with me. It was a man standing in the ocean, filling a bucket with water.

He filled it, turned around, and walked back inside.

Once my mom woke up, I pressed her about it. She told me that he had done that for as long as she could remember. At sunrise, he would walk out of his house, stroll down the beach, fill his bucket, and take it back inside.

Over the next couple of weeks, I woke up early more often to see him. His course never changed. He would walk down to the oceanside, fill his bucket, and walk back inside.

One day, As he walked down the beachfront, his eyes surveyed the sand. He looked down at the grains; small, light, and coarse. He found a small pebble next to his feet. He reached down and picked it up. Interested, he put the pebble in his bucket and began searching for more like it. He found four or five more and, satisfied with his work, turned around and went back inside.

I wondered what he was doing. He got no ocean water as he had always done before. As I watched the next day, he searched for more grains of sand. He found more like the first ones and placed them in the bucket as well.