At roughly this hour two months ago, Danny sat on a slope of Bald Mountain near Boulder and typed this to his ex-girlfriend.
Unlike when I shared this text before, this blog entry is public and I don’t have Ella’s permission to share this. I say, fuck that. It is an anthem almost. A philosophy. A beautiful and poetic expression that shouldn’t belong to her.
Reading it makes me feel both better and worse.
Two months since his birthday/death day. It feels like two seasons or two days, I can’t tell which.
I’ve been watching the robins in the yard lately as if they are emissaries from the other side. They have been coming unusually close to me. Strikingly close. I followed one to a neighbor’s cypress shrub yesterday and discovered where at least one of the nests is located.
Last night I couldn’t sleep simply because I hadn’t cried enough during the day. So I came downstairs and cried and cried. Finn came with me. Then we went back up to bed and to sleep. This is just how it is now.
To see Danny’s ashes covered in beautifully embroidered indigo linen leaves me with feelings hard to put into words … all of my sympathies have been hard found words. It’s OK .. I’m just grateful that I can be here for you.
I’m grateful you are here too Tina. And deeply so.
Dee~ I so appreciate how you are finding your way to let the feelings move through you and then move on…not ‘on’ in the sense of over anything, but…on in the sense of the next thing. May time hold you just where you need to be and until you need to be somewhere else in your journey.
May we all take a lesson from Danny and keep our eyes open to the beauty, even in the hard times.
Liz’s handmade cloth is so full of quiet beauty – simple, yet profoundly deep. A gift indeed.
Much love
Dee-
Despite Danny’s pain, he saw himself living on in the wind and the grass and the landscape, and this seemed to bring him peace. Although I feel heartbroken by your suffering, I feel also that your words and all the beauty you create honor Danny–the young man that he really was. I imagine that you are hour by hour loving every cell that was his body.
And how beloved you are to have a friend who would make the gorgeous indigo linen for his ashes.
I think I’ll put your words on my fridge. Thank you.
I don’t often use the word, “sacred” being an ex-Catholic , but when I looked at Liz’s beautiful cloth covering, that word came to mind. Not in a religious sense but in the sense of Danny, resting under the cover of the sky. This cloth, with its various shades of blue blended together, his name, the dates stitched in further blue as if robins had gathered windward threads and woven onto the cloth, creating a spirit holder. A simple cloth, a useful cloth, a cloth created from caring, love and for comfort.- A cloth that perhaps holds drops of a Mother’s tears and absorbs a Mothers heart wrung words…in other words, a cloth that becomes a sacred ordinary..
So we’ll put Marti. “A simple cloth, a useful cloth, a cloth created from caring, love and for comfort.”
It is very lovely.