Keeper of the Flame

“In plain truth, I exist more among the dead than the living, and think more about them, and, perhaps, feel more about them.”

Robert Southey, letter to S.T. Coleridge

In the dead of a summer night, I sit in my chair reading.  Far away, across the city, I hear the booms, hisses and sizzle of fireworks.  Shortly after, a fire engine or police vehicle screams through the night.  From a distance, the fireworks sound like a battle.  It would not be a surprise in this time and place of pandemic and civil unrest to read in tomorrow’s paper that the war has begun.

Later, I awake from a deep sleep and walk through the apartment.  In the rooms, I see shadowed figures sitting in the corner of a couch, standing in the middle of the room, lingering in the hall.  Who are these people?  I should be scared, but I am not.  I am strangely comforted, and if I turn to stare directly at them, they dissolve into cushions and furniture and corners.

“Our lives change but do not end.”  I repeat it to myself, a Catholic prayer for the dead.  A promise:  “Our lives change but do not end.”

She handed me the envelope—my father-in-law’s death certificate.  “Keep it for now.  I cannot look at it.”

The County of Los Angeles

Department of Public Health

Cause of death:  respiratory failure

Time interval between onset and death:  minutes

Cause of death:  lung cancer

Time interval between onset and death:  years.

Signed, sealed, delivered, done.  But we know it is never done.  In fact, it cannot be done, because we carry him with us.  I hear his voice in my brother-in-law’s greeting.  I see his expressions in my wife’s face as she cooks dinner.  During our late nights up reading, she will launch into a story, some bit remembered from childhood, a narrative remembrance but in the time frame of the story, the events of recent months are like a comet at the edge of the horizon, faint, ominous.  Parents never die.  Children never die.  Everyone lives forever, and no one ever grows old. Right? Right.

But then they do—they do grow old, suffer, encounter failure, cling to loving memory, and eventually die.  “Our lives change but do not end.”  We hold fast to it like a life raft.

I remember being a child and looking at my aunts and uncles and thinking they will never die.  I remember the death of grandparents—they are old and old people will die.  I can make it.  I can keep going.  Sadness, but still far and away, a distant fire.  Then?

We grow into the generation of funeral mourners.  Those we thought would never die, guess what?  They die.  We bury them.  We visit multiple graves in the cemetery on holidays now, buy flowers in bulk, remember moments.

Our lives are lived in denial of death until we can deny it no longer and we enter our mourning phase.  Then, the hardest to accept, we will be mourned.  “How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?”

“Our lives change but do not end.”  That is my final answer, I whisper to myself, imitating a tagline from a game show.  Yeah, the game of life show.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the dead.  I grapple with the idea of not being, so much so that I miss the time being now.  I gotta change my behavior, but here I am, right back where I was.

It’s a summer’s night and I should be thinking about childhood or possibilities or the distant flash of a bottle rocket.  Picnics and potential.  Joy and running and skin turning brown in the sun, tanned and healthy.  The taste on the tongue of chlorinated water.  Breathe deep the barbecue on a hot night, the gentle sound of ice cubes in a glass and low voices and laughter.  Tumbling and tumbling down.

“Someday, I’ll fly away.”

Yeah, wake me when you go.  I’ll be right here.

No, you won’t.  I may see you in my rooms, ghostly reminders of those lost, but you are gone, gone, gone.  I shout to you, “Don’t go, don’t.”

“When the shadows of this life have gone,

I’ll fly away;

Like a bird from prison bars has flown,

I’ll fly away.”

I wrote about grief once, for 147 pages.  All those pages like falling leaves in late autumn, falling without a sound, just a cascade of gentle, swaying breezes down to the dusty earth.  Winter coming soon.  I offered the best defense I know against the stabbing pain of grief:  storytelling.  In stories the dead come alive again.  We walk them back into existence.  We remember lost summers and quiet autumns, heavy rain on a January night, warm earth in spring.  I can see you again, not some shadow in an empty room, but real and alive, standing over the barbecue, laughing, with death so far away we cannot hear the distant roar.

What did I learn from all of this?

“When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,

I’ll fly away.”