Sometimes the fading of daylight signals loss and dimming of spirit and it causes me heartache.
It’s just evening. It used to offer mood, maybe even a melancholy mood, but not this — a crux informed by vulnerability and loss.
Sometimes it’s the wind. (I know! I know I keep pointing this out but you can’t believe how inescapable the wind is).
Today the gusty air blew grief all around me. Season and direction did not matter. Its relentless tempo felt personal, antagonistic.
I am lately better at avoiding some circular thinking that clutches at my throat but today duked it out with this question: what might I have done differently had I known he was only going to live for 30 years? Home schooling? Better, more exotic travel? A condo in Boulder ten years ago?
I turn away — better not to mull on “what if’s.”
But where do I go when the wind demands my attention and the failing light robs me of peace?
A tug. A release. A cramp, a flutter, a goodbye. Look how the fall air ruffles the leaves out back! Breathe. Please keep breathing. We could all try hard harder. Pots of sympathy stowed for when supply chains break, but what about now? Another season of jack hammering, is what, she said with a clenched jaw. Just because something isn’t as terrible as an earlier occurrence doesn’t mean it isn’t still terrible. A tug. A release. A breath. You’re still breathing, right? The heart’s syncopations. The brain’s fired off messages. Memory or dream, which is it? Fear or excitement, which is it? They say grief lives in the body, but that isn’t news – everything lives in the body. Can you sing for me at night? No, no, never mind — the treachery of reminders. Better to watch Jeopardy or sit in silence, but if silence not for too, too long. In through the nose out through the mouth. Count. For your cortisol levels. Nothing will ever be the same again, but you know what? That has always been true. Breathe. The wind is trying to get your attention and not in a good way. Six or seven sirens a day – talk about cortisol! No. Never mind. Please never mention cortisol again. The heart will one day stop and that eventuality no longer terrifies me. I now know how giving death the side eye, maybe even a welcoming nod, is not the same as being suicidal. Good to know. Good to know. Jeopardy and snacks – things to look forward to. What wind what what do you want from me? Will you ever be a neutral force of climate again or will you forever harken back to a spring at the foot of the Rockies when you blew relentlessly, when you couldn’t scour away my terror, when you met my son at 7,000 feet and made him philosophical, got him waxing on about the waving grasses, how beautiful they were, the gun in his lap. I’m at sea level now. He was at 7,000 feet then. We can never truly gauge the feelings of another. Not really. So what does the wind want of me now? I don’t need a push to remember. I remember all day long – another reason to love laying my head down at night and falling asleep. Hidden despair. Expressed despair. Both unstoppable. By me. He stopped them. Once and for all. We sigh, we remember, but what we don’t do anymore is worry about him. How we worried! We worried about him even when we didn’t know we were worrying about him. That cessation, anyway, affords a blessed peace.
Weekly protests matter even if small. I sat this one out in the coffee shop across the street.
There a friend and I talked about a journalist named Ryan Hatch and his discovery of Danny’s obituary through a CU alumnae magazine. What a sensitive response! It knocked me down, honestly.
One of my main takeaways is this: we do not know what our legacy will be. The fact that Danny’s life, including his love of Stephen King, moved a perfect stranger to such eloquence is amazing to me.
I hope kindness is part of my legacy. I hope my acts of generosity and sharing of insight will offset the impatience and frothing rants that punctuate my days.
Something to think about.
In closing, let me say that the Jack Smith memes on threads almost make the poisonous idiocy of this week’s hearing before the Senate worthwhile. Here are a few.
PS In one of the posts Jetpack spit up in the memory batch yesterday, there was one that referenced Danny calling to tell us (on October 4, seven years ago) that it was snowing hard in Boulder. I will forever miss these kinds of updates.
TL,DR: the pantheon is fucking up by letting my son die and DJT live.
Ariadne. Where are you? I’m lost. Or is your thread–cheat only for male warriors with an agenda?
Eros? Have you lost your mind? Every memory of my departed son is saturated with love, I mean grief, I mean love.
Diana, could you please get it together and take down the orange beast who threatens the well-being of all? No need to offer his head on a platter, just slay the fucker. One arrow. Please.
Persephone! I saw you there at the edge of the field of summer, disappearing in one fell tug. Hades must’ve grabbed you by the ankles. I wonder does the violent descent get easier with practice?
Does love, I mean grief, I mean love, get easier with practice? And what even is practice? It’s temporal. It’s repetition across time.
All practice leads to death.
Chronos. Have you anything to say about the merciless rigors of time? You say you’re neutral but we all know you pal around with the Grim Reaper.
Why is that bloviated menace still alive while my handsome son with the gracious smile is not?
Maybe stumbling clueless through the labyrinth is the better way to go – every bruise informing the next direction. Go left! Bump. No, go right!
If Hades can steal a youthful girl for a season of rape, why can’t he kidnap an 80-year-old man and dish him some of his own medicine and by his own medicine I mean, of course, rape?
I thought you gods were into retribution, just and unjust punishments, and hungry sexual predation.
Just ask Leda.
I swept dead leaves from the curb in preparation of this week’s storm. Heavy rain carries debris from the roadside and deposits it on the storm drain down the street. The innocent flow of water down the hill will create a lake if it’s clogged and if there’s a lake, there’s a good chance water will seep into our basement.
Some storms you can prepare for. Others, merely witness.
To be present while one’s child, craftily and in mute despair, marches to his own self-inflicted death is a torture that I wish on no one.
Well, maybe one someone, except that sick someone is so very without heart, I’m not sure that if his namesake offed himself he’d even care. I mean, the fat turd didn’t even attend the kid’s wedding.
Penelope wove and undid and wove and undid, sitting at the loom of worried expectation. She didn’t know if Odysseus, her somewhat scurrilous, conceited husband, would return.
When you read the epic poem knowing the outcome, the waiting seems trivial. We forget: she did not know.
Same with all those movies set in the early 40’s in France and England with a neighboring monster on a eugenic rampage. They did not know who would emerge the victor.
We did not know our son had bought a gun. We did not know he would really end his life. We worried and listened to the wind. We offered words of hope, delivered plates of apple slices with cinnamon.
He was having none of it. If he was Theseus, he would’ve run with unerring accuracy right into the maw of the monster. Go right! Yes, now go left!
That monster had been dogging him for years.
Sweeping up dead leaves is one thing, offering pumpkin bread and hugs to a high school friend of your dead son is another.
“We were a lot of us desperate,” he tells me. He tells me, “I went to Denver and I called and I called and he didn’t answer.”
This young man, now the age that my dead son will forever be, is getting married next year and even though I’ve only just met him, I want to be invited.
All the passages now foreclosed to our second born.
How do you even name your new circumstance? “Raised two boys. One of California, one formerly of Colorado.” That’s one new bio. That damn word count!
When the rain gets heavy this weekend, I will pray for my boy. Pray that he rests in the shelter of his own expanded self. Pray that the suffering he so doggedly encountered in life, has fallen away, leaving him pure essence, pure intelligence, pure heart.
America is dying by suicide too by the way.
So go ahead, put our dear leader’s name on the Ford Theater and then maybe by some mojo or other, he’ll share Lincoln’s demise. Can I even say that here or will some Palantir search engine find me and take me down?
Ask me if I care, Athena, but perhaps lend me your shield.
