The first and only dead body I carried was my grandfather’s. My brother and my cousins surrounded his shiny coffin with awkward formality. We each gripped our assigned handles and took his weight into our pinched hands. Who was this old farmer? Who were these men around this old farmer’s body? I hadn’t seen them in so many years. We were just boys when we last saw each other and it looked as if time had shaken us up in clear, molded glass salt and pepper shakers. The kind you find in small town diners next to the metal napkin dispensers.
My teenage son was with me that August morning. We came without my wife. She stayed home with my two-year-old daughter and my youngest newborn son as we drove to Southern Iowa, the two of us, to attend the funeral.
As we sat in the third row of pews, I could see my father in the front row. Almost a stranger to me, my father. But he looked nervous, as if he was holding back tears. It was as if he thought we were watching him, and we were. We all watch each other in times of heartache and grief…because facing death is the one time in life we all feel connected. We may not admit it, but seeing death and how others respond to death peaks our curiosity. We all are students when it comes to the ephemeral. We each ask our own version of “When a soul leaves a body, where does it go?”.
Dad kept looking down at his feet every so often as we listened to the pastor give his sermon over grandpa’s body.
He shared a story that was shared by the family. I call it the Half Moon story now, but at that moment it was new to me. It starts with my great-grandma Sis in the farmhouse kitchen making supper. She began to hear my grandpa, who was only about 6 years old, crying at the screen door. She knelt down beside him still at the old screen door…but couldn’t figure out what he was crying about. As she tried to console her little boy, she asked, “What’s wrong, Keith? What are you going on about?”
He just looked up at her with tear-filled eyes and pointed at the horizon. She followed his little finger and saw a half-moon rising above the cornfield. With his voice breaking, he choked out, “Look ma. Someone cut the moon in half.”
I let out an audible gasp, “ahhh”. It was by reflex, really. The very same thing happens to me when I hear a good piece of music, or when I witness a beautiful painting…the air in my body is pushed out of me in one big rush…whoosh…like I’m being socked in the gut.
When I heard that sentence, “Look ma, someone cut the moon in half”, I felt all of the air abandon me, leaving nothing but vacant insides and a curved spine. Left empty for the eternal to enter.
My grandpa had always been a farmer, same as his dad, and his dad before him…but those words, ”Look ma, someone cut the moon in half” held a hidden explanation of my own strange existence. The image of that half moon symbolized everything I was feeling as the son of an estranged father. An estranged family. Sure, grandpa was a farmer. But maybe, in another life, grandpa was a poet.
As I mulled over this possibility, with the sermon still going, my son leaned into me and asked, “You’re going to write a song about that, aren’t ya?”.
To which I replied, "I sure am, son."
HALF MOON
By the burning sun
you were the golden one
But you flew too close to the sea
And as you went down
I swear, the only sound
I could hear was a song sung by me
I was young when she left
Now the only thing that I kept
Might’ve been only halfway complete
So I made the rest up
On the fly, off the cuff
That’s why half truths come so naturally
In the night sky so dark
Neath the Iowa stars
A farm boy was filled up with grief
He cried and he cried
As grandma Sis tried
To wipe away his tears with her sleeve
It hung low in the sky
A half moon he cried
“Look ma, someone cut half of it from me”
Hearing that story I recall
Feeling half of my song
All my life sat silently
So now I listen close
To every bump in the night
Just in case it has anything to do with me
It’s a long, dark road
Carrying a heavy load
With no direction and no certainty
I was burnt to the ground
That’s when you found me
Just stumbling around in the dark
I was looking for a fire
I’d grown weary and tired
And that’s when you came in with your spark
Now it’s bedtime and little hands
I’m a father once again
There are three kids up under my roof
I had my doubts about love
But you were kind enough
To show me the rest of the truth
Now I’ll tell anyone, I guess I am my father’s son
I’m just the other half of that moon
Below is a link to listen to the song, Half Moon.
I am no farmer. I only spent moments of my youth on the family farm. These were sparse visits with my father and the rest of the Elliott family. I often look down at my hands and wonder if I’ve done enough with them. I see similarities between working a field and working a verse. Every season has it’s unique challenges in writing as it does in farming. Both of these fields of work inform me like two sides of the moon.
Thank you for reading!
Chad Elliott