Cruelty Dressed Up As Righteousness

"El luto humano". Año 1989. S. Sánchez

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There are deaths that fracture families, and then there are deaths that reveal fractures that were always there.

His funeral should have been a place of gathering.

Instead, it became a theatre of exile.

One coffin.

Five wakes.

And the clear announcement that I did not belong anywhere.

Silence can be the sharpest weapon. Standing outside the doors, I was told without words where I must stand. No explanation, no crime — just the sudden demotion of love to illegitimacy. So I lowered my eyes, unable to look at the wooden box that now carried the only body that had ever been my home: the arms that promised never to let me go, the heartbeat I thought I’d always fall asleep to.

The soundtrack came from behind me: “She better not think she’s sitting at the front with us.”

I watched in quiet horror as the gestures I’d made were undone — even my flowers weren’t allowed to rest with him in peace.

I waited, holding my dying soul together, and pretended I didn’t notice the rush of bodies pulling toward the coffin like a broken-down transit van dragging a load it could never carry.

I trailed behind, silently weeping, forcing my feet forward.

Inside, the message was clearer still. Rows crammed with performance, and one pew left conspicuously empty.

My pew.

A stage prop.

A warning: stay away from her.

I came with nothing but love.

They came with speeches sharpened like knives.

They brought grief dressed for an audience.

I brought mine from home, already broken in.

We had our own language, he and I. They didn’t speak it, yet they tried to write our ending. But grief doesn’t obey editors. It keeps speaking in the dialect of love, long after the performance has closed its curtain.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the heckler hiding at the back.

After the theatre of public grief, I returned to the private shrine of our life. His helmet still in the chair he once claimed. An unopened can beside it, like an unfinished sentence. Photographs scattered across the floor — not staged, not curated, just evidence of a love that lived its ordinary holiness.

This is the difference between spectacle and truth: one performs grief, the other endures it.

Public mourning edits for palatability.

Private mourning refuses to edit at all.

It leaves the mess — the objects, the silence, the ache.

And in that mess, love remains legible.

When grief is contested, love is put on trial.

Their version cast me as villain, and for a time I believed them. Grief seeps under the skin like that, whispers accusations in your own voice, convinces you absence is proof of unworthiness. That is the cruelty of exile: it doesn’t stop at pushing you out of the room, it follows you home.

Public grief is polished, brief, and staged for applause. Real grief is barefoot, contradictory, unkempt — a language only two people ever spoke. If public grief seeks witnesses, private grief seeks truth. And truth has no need for ribbons or expiration dates.

Exile became my apprenticeship.

While public mourning demanded witnesses, private mourning demanded endurance. Mine came as letters unsent, as visions of reunion that could never be enacted. Quiet, unspectacular, unshakable.

It was in that silence I learned what the performance never could: Truth lives where noise subsides.

She doesn’t explain or plead.

She rests cool in the shade, steady as river stones beneath bare feet.

She has weathered every storm before this one, and she will weather every storm after.

In making me the villain, they don’t have to ask the harder questions.

Like why he never let them all the way in.

Why his arms reached for me in the dark.

Why his love lived where they refused to look.

Cruelty has a way of dressing itself up as righteousness.

It powders its nose in the mirror of public opinion, and steps into the light, draped in the costume of self-imposed virtue — forgetting it hasn’t showered in years.