Most of the time, their presence is nothing more than ambience, a whisper in the oaks as you pass by, but I had been gone for three years, and much had happened to me. My life is different, my friends different, my appearance different.
On one of my days there, my mother needed to return chairs to the Methodist church I attended as a child. I agreed to go with her, to help her lug the chairs back down to the basement, and as we finished up, she offered me the opportunity to take a few moments' walk past the oaks down to the slope of the hill where several of my family members are interred.
I thought of my grandfather, and remembered with a sudden sharp sadness that if my nephew is nearly ten, then my grandfather has been gone for ten years now. Keith, gone for close to twenty; my father, gone for four.
I stood there for a moment. The wind whispered a song I knew well. I'd played in that cemetery as a child, had learned and loved the names and starkly simple markers that most of my distant relatives had chosen for their loved ones. It was as familiar of territory as I'll ever find on my travels in this world. I stood there for a moment, and remembered what I said last time: three times, once for each of them, just in case the dead only hear the words we whisper directly to them:
I've been gone a long time. In many ways I've grown up into someone you wouldn't recognize, and you probably wouldn't entirely approve of. I cared a lot about what you thought of me, but in the end, I've had to make my own choices. I wouldn't be the person I am now if I'd stayed here, but you shaped my life and I remember you, and I hope that is enough.
I raised my camera to my right eye and took a photo, then turned to my mother and said, "Maybe later," knowing full well that I would not go, because there was nothing new to say.
For the dead, there is nothing but time. For me, the oaks will whisper for the rest of my days; my memories are there, but my loves and my loyalties are here.
Until there's something new to say, I'll leave them be.
]]>I am thankful for the fact that I wake up each morning. Some days I realize just how much of a victory that alone is. I still wear my Santa hat almost every day in December, even though it squishes my bangs into funny shapes that I don't quite get ironed out until January.
I still have one memory of Christmases past that is capable of making me cry.My grandfather made the best waffles. Ever. It was, simply, what was for breakfast on holidays. My cousins and I would fight over the waffles each year—though, in retrospect, it wasn't much of a fight, because Clint always seemed to win every single time.
We would crowd around the kitchen table, adults and children alike, and it was winner-take-all on the waffles. There was no rank; it was just whoever had the luck, the timing, and the persistence to nab the waffles as my grandfather took them out of the waffle iron.
We weren't above stealing waffles off of each other's plates, either. I know I've had it done to me more than once.
I've been to the cemetery twice on this trip to Arkansas. The first time, I went there alone, at sunset on a rainy, foggy day. I knew that I wanted to shoot some photographs in the cemetery, but that Jeff would be with me when I did so. I needed to say and acknowledge some things in my heart, and I needed to do so alone.
Someone suggested to me this year that a way to make grief constructive is that for each time your mind reminds yourself of the grief about the loss of someone you cared about, to turn that on its head and think of one positive memory of their life. Instead of mourning their loss, celebrating their life and the experiences they shared with you.
I expect that my nephew will come barrelling into my parents' house the moment he wakes up and can get his mother—my sister—out the door. We will open presents and thoroughly destroy my mother's living room. I will sit back in the corner of the room, as I do every year. I've never been totally comfortable with my parents' videotaping each Christmas, partly because I dislike being videotaped and partly because I know they get impatient with my slow, deliberate way of opening presents.
(Side note: my parents would love nothing better, I think, than to see me rip into my presents one Christmas morning. It just isn't how I am.)
The gifts will be marveled at, played with, and tried on, and then we'll pack up our things and drive the mile or so down the road to my grandmother's. Where we'll settle into the kitchen and have waffles.
]]>My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.
]]>My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.
Bitter though it was, it was my grandfather's death that showed me exactly who Jeff was. I won't mourn my grandfather actively until the end of my days, but at the same time, my life will never quite be the same without him. My grandfather's death changed everything—not the least of which was a thoroughly-new relationship with some fellow named Jeff.Call it a love-letter, if you will, a love-letter born out of grief and isolation and all shades of angry hurt in between. Call it a love-letter from a girl I once was, to someone who correctly assumed I wouldn't be that way forever.
There are always days in which one wonders why they love the spouse they have. It is easy to forget in the day-to-day what was so extraordinary that made you sign the contracts to create this day-to-day routine.
Lucky me. I remember what was extraordinary.
May, 1996. I had finished washing clothes at Susan's apartment. My dorm room was in the building closest to the library. At the time, I worked in the computer lab located in the bottom floor of the library. While there, I received a phone call. My sister had somehow gotten the number of the computer lab, and her message was simple: "Come home. Now. Drop whatever you're doing. It's your grandfather."
Which is exactly what I did.
I came home and found—chaos. My grandfather, comatose after a stroke. A stillwatch. My mother, trying to comfort her mother. My sister, nine months pregnant and due any day.
I called Jeff, this person far away, this person newly in a relationship with me, and blurted out everything. It was the heavy black 1950s phone, heavy enough to clunk burglars with; it took both hands to hold. I cradled it in my hands and said, "Please come. I need you here."
He came. No questions asked, no argument. Seven hours of driving, into a family he didn't know, a girl he probably didn't know as well as he should have, and for a grandfather whom he had only met once. He nominally stayed in my sister's bedroom, but truthfully spent most of the time in mine. Comforting. Talking. Letting me talk.
My grandfather died in the late morning hours a couple of days later. Jeff called and made arrangements with his employer to stay in Arkansas for a day or two longer, so that he could stay with me for the funeral. The night of the funeral, we lay in bed, both of us on top of the covers, and I sobbed. There are many times in my life that I have cried, but few in which I've actually been distraught enough to lose all shreds of dignity and sob. I said to Jeff, "I never got the chance to tell him I loved him, and now I'll never have that chance again."
He used the pad of his thumb to brush away the most fat and offending tears, and said, "He knew. He knows."
Five years later, it sounds silly and melodramatic, doesn't it? Amazing, sometimes, how life echoes campy melodrama, makes the imaginable absurd and the absurd easily imaginable.
A month or two after the funeral, my mother hugged me and thanked me for being there for her during the entire ordeal. She, hesitating, brought up the subject of Jeff. She was quiet for a few moments and then said, "I don't know what he did while he was here. All I know is that he gave you the strength to be there for me when I know you needed comfort as much as I did. All I ever ask is that he love you and take care of you, and be there for you when you need someone in your life. Keep him."
Then…tonight.
Jeff's classes are over. He begins finals in a day or two. We had friends over tonight, and tonight he lounged on the couch and relaxed with us. It was a glimpse—tantalizing, brief, promising—of the loving and thoughtful person I married.
I remember what was extraordinary about you, Jeff, as surely as I know you are reading this. Tonight I remembered what it was about you that caused me to love you in the first place. You, of the big laugh and soft scratchy beard and dry wit and perceptive eyes. You, better than any other person, know why I am so determined to make sure that the people I love know that I love them.
You, better than any other person.
Welcome home. I have missed you so very, very much.
]]>A few nights ago I had a dream about Rustina. Rustina Wear, gone these fifteen years, gone one year less than she lived—the girl who was my sister's childhood best friend. I would make expected and pithy statements about how her untimely death in a freak car accident was one that affected us deeply.
]]>A few nights ago I had a dream about Rustina. Rustina Wear, gone these fifteen years, gone one year less than she lived—the girl who was my sister's childhood best friend. I would make expected and pithy statements about how her untimely death in a freak car accident was one that affected us deeply.
Except that I can't say any such things. I only know of her death through her absence. Does that make sense? I don't remember much about her except to remember the hole that was in her place after she was gone.What I dreamed about was the poem written on the back of her headstone. When my sister and her classmates cleaned out Rustina's locker at school, they found bits and pieces of poetry scribbled on pieces of paper jammed into her locker. Some consolation, then, that they found something emotionally fitting that was short enough to be inscribed on her headstone.
I have a picture of the stone in my memory book. It was the last picture on a roll of film, and thus the colors were damaged. I haven't read the inscription in years; I don't have to. I can't recite the entire piece from memory, but I do remember a two-line couplet that has stayed with me since the moment I finally, truly, awfully comprehended it:
"There is always the time
For washing the dishes
But never enough time
For wishing your wishes."
- then, in my dream, I walk away.
Sometimes I wish my sister had talked about her. I always had the sense that I missed something; Rustina's name was rarely mentioned. She was "she," a pronoun with no antecedent. No antecedent necessary. But every time my sister would mention her friends—we teased her about how she would say the ungrammatical phrase "Me an' Sherry an' Adriel" so fast it sounded like one word—yet we could always hear the fourth name that wasn't added in anymore.
When I awoke from the dream, I was most stunned by a realization of age. At the time of her death, I was nine. Since that time, my perception of age difference has not changed, even though my actual age has. Even now, I picture her as being nine years older than my current age. The part that kept me awake was realizing that I am almost nine years older than she will ever be.
I found this strangely hard to accept.
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