I was young. My grandfather preached at his own church, and I would sit in the front row with my father and sister. It’s something we dressed nice for–I remember my father’s dress shoes; gray with laces, worn later to my grandmother’s funeral. Before her final resting day, he wore them to church.

During service he passed me Certs from his coat pocket and smiled sideways at us, always making sure we were alright. My grandfather would holler and shout his sermons, pacing from one end of the stage to the other, coming down the aisle, turning red above the collar. The older women answered and pressed flat hands to the pages of their open bibles. There was prayer and tongue speak, bluegrass. At his funeral, it will break my heart to hear that music again–it will take me right back to being small and frightened in the middle of the pew. It would take me back to that red interior, to the underlined passages of his preaching bible, to the mix of perfumes and tight smiles that followed the end of service.

So many times it was just the three of us–dad, my sister, me. We were a pyramid of catch and drop, tears and victory. We wore Sunday dresses and hugged our barely-known aunts, the ones with uncut manes who taught me how to skate backwards while trusting the hands that held mine. I did not know what faith was; I did not understand the sacrifices made to keep me safe. I did not realize the closeness of family, how things would always be changing later in life, that I would find these moments bittersweet with age.

At my grandfather’s funeral, I sat with my cousins and not with my boyfriend–I wore black and braided my hair, felt numb, held the hand of the relative next to me. We all cried for the duration of the service. We stood at the front of the room, each palm gripping a candle that smelled just like his cologne–the silver will need polished, someone told me. We had a late lunch at my aunt’s house and I felt offended by the small talk surrounding me. At the gravesite, we released balloons into a very blue sky, and my father hugged his daughters with a shake in his shoulders and I knew right then I would never be able to protect everything important to me–not all at once, not as it should be. There were no words to comfort the man who raised me–I could only be there, and try to understand that this is part of life; the passing, the end of this body and duration of time.

Every time I went to church, I could only mouth the words to the hymns–never bringing myself to sing. Religion represented such a brief passage of youth and family, and with history it disappeared. Congregations steeped in emptiness so I could not sing along. The words glory and God and sacrifice and lamb and blood–I could not grip them with my voice, could not understand their relevance to life outside a sanctuary. I made the choice to get baptized at sixteen because all I had was time and confusion–hair still wet I was in my car in the church parking lot thinking, “well that was a mistake.” I started the car and I drove back to my world and my hair dried itself over hours, and I forgot about being in white, in front of a room of people. I gave nothing to God; I gave nothing.