Come, then, we’ll walk. What else is there to do? / in the uncertainties of dangerous May? *
A month unsettled, shoved by grief out of its natural order, a disturbance so great as to rock the ground and stir the sky and force all former reliances to capitulate.
You are gone and I am not.
If spirit abides, where does it linger and what observe? Does the growth of hosta capture its ethereal sensibility? Does my weeping come into view? Does the unforging of body and spirit strike the free–floating soul as a disruption or as a natural and indeed relieving unshackling?
I want all things to be true. The body is gone, the rest of him is not. The rest of him wants to be known, and by me, and not by butterfly sightings or the wondrous appearance of hummingbirds, but by his words, his humor, his enduring curiosity.
I fear it’s too much to ask.
It’s also too much to ask that spring in all her resilient and cyclic abundance offer up any mood akin to cheer. I kneel and weed and lay down mulch and notice the tidy difference. Tidiness — a measure of time well spent and not much more than that.
But birds? Well, they’re different.
Since I returned home from the Land of Death, filling the feeders has become a sturdy ritual. I want to see those finches and cardinals every day, the doves on the ground below. When a robin hops up into one of our water bowls, yes, then, I feel uplifted. The solar fountain works! How the birds love moving water! Robins go to one bowl, sparrows to the other.
The maples leaf and canopy the streets. Lilacs offer up their scent everywhere except at our corner, where our neighbor’s hedge of lilacs fails and flounders and barely puts out two wands of flowers. I can recall a time when I wanted to volunteer to care for these shrubs. That person is gone. Yesterday, I walked past the dense inner growth so badly in need of pruning and the undone chore barely registered. No impulse to tend and care.
The task has become watching their decline. I dread the empty space that will result after they eventually are felled — but dreading felling and anticipating the emptiness where something once vibrant lived come as a more fitting occupation for a May gone rogue.
Will the iris bloom this year? Last year they did not. So far we’ve dug up one dead dogwood, one dead azalea, and one dead euphorbia. The dead Rose of Sharons wait for our spades.
Stop telling me how deep grief is really love. Everyone has something to say. Grief is this, grief is that. What I know is how the torso fills with tears each day until reaching past collarbones to throat and then falling. It doesn’t feel like love.
“Are you crying?” asks B, and I laugh.
I’ve always been a yeller not a crier so this is new terrain for me. These days, I don’t feel like yelling (unless, that is, my husband is taking forever to finish a sentence, but even then I’m more likely to hard tap my thigh or the kitchen counter than to yell).
Maybe to get reacquainted with my well-practiced habit of yelling, I need to drive more. Use your blinker, motherfucker! Oh so we’re doing 22 now, dipshit?
Gardening dirt dries out my hands, somehow lining nails and cuticles even when I wear gloves. Brush and scrape, lotion – at least five times a day. I’ve taken to slathering cream on my hands and wearing white cotton gloves when we walk the dog. A small, weird, observable accommodation to season – not as noticeable, perhaps, as my face crumpling into tears at the top of the hill.
I don’t care who sees.
The maple-lined streets, the school, the dying lilacs, the returning ferns and hosta, all occupy a world I thought I knew.
Articulate what you miss, say the experts, it’ll help you integrate the fact of their absence, its permanence.
What if I want the disbelief to last as long as possible? And what if the thing I miss the very most about my son is simply that I knew he was alive?
Of course, I miss his smile, his cool, understated boarding style, his pride in housekeeping, his texts about wild weather swings in Colorado. I miss his likes on Instagram — for Smile Boulder, for instance. Never again will his bubble float or his moniker appear in accounts we both like. You wouldn’t think this would register as such a loss, but it does.
More than anything though I miss knowing that he’s out there somewhere living his life — getting groceries, hanging out with his cats, wading Boulder Creek to cast a line. All activities both real and imagined abruptly terminating will never make sense.
The maple trees’ resilient return to green acts as both an affirmation and an affront. This year, life renewing itself and going on makes about as much sense as a life so early and violently ended. What succor in spring? I think I’ve already said.
So here I am in a May gone rogue, taking a walk, perhaps, and disappearing into a silence that feels but probably isn’t permanent.
Meanwhile somewhere in Texas a skilled needle worker stitches your name on linen. She’s making a beautiful bag for the box of ashes. The touching gesture wrecks me.
Opening lines above from a poem by John Fuller, “Martin Meadows.” Writing prompt provided by Kathleen Olesky this week.
