Intimately the same...

Third memorial service in six weeks.  The three could not be more different in culture, age, and circumstance.  What they all have in common is how deeply the ones left here love the ones who have died.  The ones left here will never quite be the same.  The ones left here will feel the deep dark empty for a long time. The ones left here will be gratefully surprised by the outpouring of love from those who feel their loss with them.  The ones left here will be lost...will wander...will one day find the life in them to walk a new path with new hope and new life.

Amazing how vastly different but intimately the same we all are...

One memorial service was for a student who had only one semester left before graduating...he took his own life. Only child.  Son of a retired Detroit (Irish) police officer and Vietnamese mother. Service held at the Sailing Club Marina---soooo many kids and the stories at the mic went on and on and the afternoon was gorgeous, and the water was beautiful and his boat was up by the platform.

Second service was for a 16 year old hispanic girl who suddenly dropped from an aneurysm...so full of life and love...plans for the future...JROTC...her boyfriend is one of the nicest young gentlemen you will ever meet---he is my student.  The service was in a dominantly Hispanic Catholic church packed to the gills with people in the chapel close circuit tv (and this is not a small church), along the sides and in the narthex...packed full...lovely service.

Third service was for the husband of a good friend in his 60s who had cancer riddling his body, taking his life slowly the last year or more.  Held traditionally in the United Methodist Church---very intimate and formal with a minister who spoke well of him.  Lovely family, close community.  He was a collector and lover of classic cars and the parking lot was filled with them---they are so very beautiful and it was touching to see so many of his friends come and bring their classics in honor of him.

between death and resurrection october 4

100414  Emotional bombs keep exploding at the sight of things I’d forgotten.  Why do I weep?  Does it matter? I weep.   Dad, dead now only five months.  Like yesterday and forever alive but I can’t reach him or talk to him or roll my eyes when he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.  Except for that one time just before we had to move him to hospice, I got home from a visit, they live three hours away, and I called him to say I’d arrived home safely and we chatted about how wonderful the weekend was (as we always do) and then in childlike fun we exchanged all kinds of goodbyes—his voice, my dad’s of all my life so familiar so right so him, but in light-heartedness so rare for a man so serious—we played with, exchanged, all the different words for bubye...see you later alligator, tata for now, ciao, ciao bella, so long, see you next time, it’s been real, sianara, toodloo, adios amigos, bubye...and it went on for awhile and I was giggling and he chuckling, so great to hear joy in his voice, and mama was in the background saying, “Jerry!  Hang up the phone now!”  Dad and I were gloriously stuck in some delightful spin of timeless, spaceless connection that of course now is weighted down with all the grief of time violently chiseling away at such precious moments of being and connection, forever here separated by a violent, traumatic death that quickly followed that call.  It keeps roaring back at me like the relentless ocean waves storming onto the beaches of my memory and I can’t swim there any more.

Now Mama stands in her new, smaller, more cost efficient “garden apartment” sorting through for the third time in as many months, what she treasures.  This last time she sorted without me and so I picked up boxes labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” (my friend and I and others are having a garage sale next month).  This morning, back at my house, I opened one box she’d filled and in it, carefully wrapped, are the blue delft plates she so dearly loves from Holland they bought when they traveled there, permanent fixtures in every kitchen since, emblems of my youth and the certainty of a loving, mostly stable family and there they are in a box labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” and the whole world again crashes down on my heart and soul and it’s like the earth opens and swallows me into the shards of no longer being. And I hear echoing mama’s voice last weekend as she stands in her new, smaller, more efficient “garden apartment” say, “I just don’t really care about any of it any more.  I’m over it.  I look at things I’ve loved for so long and I’m just over it. Is that horrible?”  I don’t remember what I answered (didn’t know she meant my childhood, our whole lives together, surely she didn’t mean that exactly) probably responded that it might just be the numbness of so much grief and loss happening all at once that this is kind of a defense mechanism.  I’ll keep everything for you, Mama.  Maybe one day soon you’ll want it back.

Then again maybe not.

As keeper of the treasure I feel the weight of all who have gone before more profoundly than ever.  I have furniture and wall hangings and treasures with rich, variegated stories, swords and knives from all over the world, figurines and plates and, plateware, a window from Mama Ruth’s house, Chinese praying Jesus from Mema’s house, quilts from grands I never met, a village carved from a single piece of mahogany three feet long, and I can’t let go of any of it because I want my Dad back.