It was my friend's birthday. It was the anniversary of our reunion, as I have come to say 'after long silence.' It was also the day (last year) that I marked by writing and then leaving a letter for him near the river he loved so much. The route to the river includes hydrangeas, and he loved them, too.
I did not go to the river. I am still unsure that I will ever make my way there again. I haven't yet held the portion of his ashes that are entrusted to me (at least not to acknowledge this particular occasion). I wouldn't even get very close to where he is interred. But I went there... to the chapel... with his sister.
I watched the evidence of her grief, and knew again what was already certain; that her's is most like mine. But after sharing tables, tears, meals and secrets, I landed on the thought that being with her was probably more of a comfort to me than to her. They look so much alike, after all.
He's there in the way she throws her head back when she laughs. In her height. In the hue of her skin. In her eyes. In her hands ---except that her's are so tiny.
Oh, I am hoping he saw us! I am hoping he was the invisible guest, silent partner and third wheel... because he would have loved that we were together.
I am tired. School has been out for a solid month, and still I don't find time to write here or to write the letters I have promised here and there. And the sorrow is still exhausting. I still don't know what to do with it. I have fine moments, but, in general, things have a flatness. Maybe I have said that before? I found it hard to string thoughts together this weekend. I remember, by feel, the way I described the sensation of loss : shot at close range by a musket. This weekend I used "blown apart." Can it be that I was better at all of it--- articulation included --- a year ago???
How do I take him with me and [ still ] go on? I realize, actually, that I am beginning to forget things, or confuse them, when artifacts like letters set me straight. People talk about his laughter and I am not really sure that I can still hear it. Have I fleshed out the edges and filled in the gaps with what I think belongs there?
Fear. It was Sunday's sermon, and, obviously, it stays with me when moments or memory flee. In C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed he starts off with fear as well. I hear my friend's query as I type this, words running together, "Whatsamatter, darlin?" It's all the matter... It's that he mattered. It's that he was matter. It's that I mattered, too.
Have I said before that our knowledge of each other began with a letter? I know I haven't said that I made a trip to see him sight unseen in one of my lifetime's few acts of pure bravery. I haven't said--- at least not here--- that the place he prepared for us was probably the most comfortable place I had ever been up to that time in my life. That would please him so to know... and I can't remember if I ever told him ....
Fear. Fear of what I left unsaid ( although it is minor and I am capable of shaking it off ). Fear that there is so little I know. Except for this: what I brought him--- what I brought to him --- may already be the most important thing my life will have accomplished. He was extraordinary; in the long catalog of things that made him so, there is that he made sure I knew exactly what our currency had been. Thank God he did. I'd be adrift, I swear, without his deliberate precision in articulating value and affection. Many who knew him would be suffering so much more without that loving habit of his.
SO here I am. A year later. Still feeling the musket blow. A year of deliberate resistance from the gravitational pull of grief. Still trying to remain upright and grappling for relief. Talking to him in the dark, seeing him in my mind's eye.... Meaning was wrought into so many moments, clarity and comfort are found in many of them....And in reaching for his sister's hand in a makeshift chapel or across a table.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by e.e. cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully , suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
