November

People die. They marry. Rain falls, and then, an oddly warm sun shines. 

None of it makes any sense. Moments of it make every kind. 

We walked up the hill behind the car with a beloved body inside that it made no sense was dead. It was an impossibly beautiful day, radiant with late fall sun. We didn't know where we were, really, literally or figuratively. We'd seen this church, but never the cemetery. We'd seen her dead, but never where she'd rest. And when we saw it, this sun-crazy place, we were, I could tell, unexpectedly, collectively pleased. Who would not want to rest here? Who who had loved the outdoors would not want to eventually land here, leaves and birds and trees?

Besides the obvious answer of a person who died entirely too soon, there was some kind of seemingly collective calling in of eventual redemption among what had just seemed a waste, a fight against a disease that took and tested and eventually killed.

I have a phrase that I've come to use over the years, "locate in space." If you matter, if it matters, if I can locate you in space amid the inevitable chaos, I'm okay. If I feel you must need me, must need to find me for any reason, I'm available. You can locate me. 

That's what we were doing. We were located in space, you could find us all there, your spirit, I guess, if it needed to. You were there, I'm sure, because you were powerful like that. We were locating, all lost in whatever our perception and processing was of this event, and no matter what the hem of Daddy's suit, the sun glint off of Patrick's phone, Jimmy's cigar smoke, Billy's grieving dog on a leash. It brought us back. 

It's weird, the things that call you home. You may have to work harder for them over the years, older as you are, more inured. They're still there. They will always be. 

You leave someone you loved for better or for worse in the ground on a sun-speckled hill in a county just north of where you live. You make a phone call or wait for a text message from someone you're not sure at all you love but you're fairly sure you do -- although maybe you do or don't or probably you shouldn't -- from states away at the same time. Your relatives ask you who you're seeing and you can't appropriately answer according to the family construct, because there is no acceptable answer besides yes, this. Your job sucks. 

All of this swirls around you. 

It swirls around me. 

It is so hard. 

And meanwhile, amid this, you know that ease is around the corner. You know for goddamned sure that there is one brave, impossibly difficult step between you and the next part, before it all smooths out, as it must, to make the second half so immeasurably better than the first, as you know you need it to be, in this particular combination of human body and brain. 

And you know you have to take it. You know the story  is  playing out -- like Sons of Anarchy, like Hamlet, like The Facts of Life. You know that you are merely the instrument to see it through. 

And that's the part that's hard. That's the part that exposes what you're paying for, whatever past-life-things you think you did, and that after that, after you accept the hugeness that you may lose and the beyond-hugeness that you'll gain? You know although you don't want to know at all, really, that that's where it is. 

That's the real thing. That's the good stuff. 

You're kind of ready, though. You're done. Alert Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the media, the people in boxes underground who would have ultimately loved you no matter what, who do not care at all from where they lay beyond what it looks like except please, please, please be happy?

You know like they would have ultimately, like maybe they knew before you. That you are so, so  beyond, so overdue. 

Comments

[Deb Rox]

Beyond, beyond overdue. (You threw down some really beautiful work here.)

[Sarah]

Beautiful.

[sizzle]

You make me write more and to write better. xo