This Changing World

That’s where the stress falls

That’s where the bough breaks

The sense of a missing limb

The sense that part of you exists, elsewhere

We are on a search

To bring home the children we once were

If we could find them once again

Out among the living

Sometimes we must make do with a memory

A flickering candle on a warm summer’s evening

A light of love

In this changing world.

My father-in-law’s ashes have come to stay with us for a while.  He rests in the den among our books and treasured possessions.  Still, I cannot bear to think of it.  There is a picture of him with my wife on a shelf across the room.  He is smiling.  Someone snapped the picture at my niece’s wedding rehearsal dinner, in a much happier summer just a few years ago.  Yesterday, really.  That is what it seems like.  Yesterday.

Where is his consciousness now?  Is he beyond this world, this changing world?  Or, too terrible to contemplate, does he still possess some awareness of what is happening, the grief, the horrific sense of loss?  Does he see us struggling to go on?  Whatever he knows or doesn’t, we go on.  There is no choice.  Coming, though, is our own separation, our own departure to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”  This will happen.  After more than three decades together, my wife and I will be separated by death, and for the survivor, the loss will be immense, unfathomable.  No way around it, this is the Great Divide.

I believe in the spiritual life force that encompasses everything.  There is an interconnectedness, some thin fiber holding all life in concert, the symphony of us, past, present and future.  We are never alone in our struggles but it is not like the dead are physically here with us.  The dead have crossed over but we must remember the Catholic Prayer For the Dead:

“Lord, those who die still live in Your presence,

Their lives change but do not end…”

Or, a more secular view from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried:  being dead is “like being inside a book nobody is reading…An old one.  It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time.  All you can do is wait.  Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”

Maybe the dreams I have had for some time now, the dreams about living in isolation and solitude are really all about trying to block myself off from the pain and separation of death.  My idyll:  the proverbial cabin in the woods, Henry David Thoreau’s cabin.  Is that cabin really a coffin?  To cut off oneself from humanity is to be truly dead, the very thing I fear.

Maybe I have not written my way out of grief, or even to an understanding of grief.  Maybe I have not learned enough about the mysterious connective tissue between each and every human heart.  Ours is a story etched in our DNA.  O’Brien, again:

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.  There is an illusion of aliveness.”

The dead, the living, we are all connected.  “[Our] lives change but do not end.”

I can go on with this, knowing we are never separated, that human life is one long quilt to keep us warm in the cold of eternity.  I can live with that analogy.  It will be a struggle, but with this knowledge, we can go on, we can cross the chasm of loss and go on.