Creek Running North

Chris, yesterday I read this review by one of my favourite authors, of a book by an author I wish I knew better. Your post somehow resonates with it;

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1878726,00.html

*appreciative sigh*

I very much admire the way you can take two themes and intertwine them.  :)

Somewhere I read that emotions like grief or shame or pain can resonate like a giant bell—the gong strikes inside you and the inward vibrations knock you sideways.  I’ve got a few of those bells ringing inside me, every now and then, but nothing to compare with yours.

“If someone tells you that grief ebbs, thank them for their compassion but do not take them at their word. It does not ebb.”

Every time someone I love dies, I wonder which would be better to have in their place, a hole or a scar.  I am always both frustrated and relieved not to have a choice.

It doesn’t ebb.  It changes.  The loss doesn’t change, but the experience of it changes.  That’s how you can “forget to grieve.” It’s one of biology’s little tricks, I think, to keep us from killing ourselves.  I haven’t yet decided whether or not it’s a dirty trick.

Aeschylus didn’t think it was a dirty trick;

Drop, drop—-in our sleep, upon the heart
sorrow falls, memory’s pain,
and to us, though against our very will,
even in our own despite,
comes wisdom
by the awful grace of God.

This touches my heart deeply—I find the knowledge that love and grief are as complicated for others as it is for me deeply comforting. And of course you write beautifully.

Nothing to add except that what you say is true, and yet we somehow go on. Beautifully crafted and felt, Chris - and somehow the rabbit beside the hole softens it. I look for those furry edges around grief, too.

Reminds me of Tom Wood. We roomed together in the bunkhouse at this ranch where we crewed, fellow cowpokes who worked together, sometimes drank together, often groused at each other in surly spirits, but were friends in the summation of it all.

He was about five or six years older than me, and I looked up to him. Still, I was the more experienced with horses, and I drove the hay wagons and sleighs – he was my helper with the harnessing, and with the guests.

My most vivid memory is of him with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, gesturing broadly with one of his frequent Budweisers, “Welp, when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go!”

He had dogs, Sadie and Farfel. Sadie slept on his bed and coveted a tiny blue plastic Smurf as her favorite toy. Farfel was demented and would dig on command, wherever Tom pointed, even if the designated spot was on a carpeted floor.

Tom was a “gear” cowboy, and he spent great amounts of his meager income on such cowboy-cultural accoutrements as authentic imported Australian dusters, hand-stitched boots, satin wildrags and Civil War cavalry hats with braided horsehair hatbands.

Six months after uttering the above quote, he was gone. The purplish bump on his temple turned out to be malignant melanoma, and by the time he gave up the cowboy-style stoic denial, it was too late to do anything about it. He’d moved back to live with his dad, over the other side of the mountains, and I never got to see him again after he left. One day his letters just stopped, and it was a week before I found out he was gone.

He kept a journal in his final months, and it passed to a mutual lady friend, who has since misplaced it. I have a picture or two of him somewhere, but I probably couldn’t find them without a week’s search through ancient boxes stacked in my spare room. The memories of him are patchy, even more misplaced than these sketchy saved remnants.

Tom was only 39 when he died, and that was 20 years ago, almost to the day. Funny to think of him frozen in my memory at 39 for all these years, and me now 54. He was just an idiot kid, like all of us were, and never knowing it.

Last night I dreamed of Ranger, my beloved German shepherd, gone now almost nine years, whom I had just gotten not long before Tom moved away to die. In my dream, I got to give Ranger a full-body hug, and the feel of his bony frame, his spare muscles, his rough fur, his ALIVENESS was there in my mind as I woke up.

They become part of us, I like to think. Me, a rabid atheist who has no least hint of belief in souls, can still imagine silly-putty-like imprints that people make on us when our paths cross. Those imprints can last, and shape us. And though they seem foggy, to our waking minds, they’re back there somewhere, waiting for the trigger of sleep, or a picture, or the sight of a horsehair hatband.

“When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.� In my head, I still sneer at the echoed words. Decades more of life might have awaited him. Silly bastard.

I never got to read his journal.

“how long will you grieve?”
“i will grieve for her until someone else grieves for me.”

i’m very grateful that in nine years, no one has exhorted me to “get over it.” i don’t think i’d like life in prison.

Love always ends in grief, for someone at least.

I’ve lost (through death or separation, the circumstances don’t matter so much as the space left by the absence) a parent (my mom and dad, divorced for ten years, got back together a scant three weeks before my mother died), lovers, two handfuls of pets, good friends, better friends, a suicidal former student who had adopted me as a surrogate dad… losses in waves, rolling in from an indifferent ocean with an almost banal regularity.  There are no happy endings… after over sixty years of marriage, my grandmother is now watching my grandfather (a former engineer and master of bad puns) decline further each week into senility.

When mom died, I didn’t cry for four years.  I didn’t think about her, or my loss and what it meant in my life at all… which meant, of course, that I was constantly thinking about it.  Her absence didn’t so much create a hole in me as carve out a hole into which I fell, one so large that I couldn’t even see its edges to know the extent to which it existed.

It can be one of the hardest things in the world to continue to love, to crave those connections once you know how it’s going to end.  There have been times in my life when I’ve actively resisted that impulse.  And yet, I’ve never been able to shut it off completely, or for any significant length of time.  Camus’s Sisyphus eternally pushes a boulder up a mountain and derives meaning from the struggle.  In a similar sense, love is its own reward despite its necessarily transient existence.

Thanks for sharing this. You’ve said it so beautifully. This time of year always surprises me the loss of my best friend 17 years ago.

You blog grief better than anyone, Chris.

where an anise hyssop had been growing

You can’t make absynthe out of bamboo, the anise hyssop is so very very important. 

One of my favorite absynthe chemists died in an auto accident last week.  Her husband, a dear and close friend whom i have known long before she came into his life, is bereft and on suicide watch.  They had just purchased a beautiful new small ranch, over by Genoa NV (a bit north into western Jacks Valley), had sold their house/ farm in Merced, and were finally looking to their life as retired happy free beings.  Lousy month for driving i guess (and earthquakes too).

I just read your series of J. posts. Those, and this—you write with immense grace and beauty. Thank you.

Love.

I’ve been through loving and losing a lot lately and try to approach it phlosophically to deal.

One of the great challenges of life is that we are all mortal, and all the people we love and cherish are mortal as well.

Treat your loved ones/friends/whatever as well as you treat yourself. That way you have no regret if suddenly they should flash out and go to the other side of the veil, the one that we here can make no difference in.

I’d rather love and grieve than never have friends or cats. Because my friends and my loves are the center and fulcrum to myt life.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
and stops my mind from wandering
where it will go
I’m filling the cracks that ran though the door
and kept my mind from wandering
where it will go

And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong
I’m right where I belong
I’m right where I belong
See the people standing there
who disagree and never win
and wonder why they don’t get in my door

I’m painting my room in a colorful way,
and when my mind is wandering
there I will go

And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong
I’m right where I belong
I’m right where I belong
Silly people run around
they worry me and never ask me
why they don’t get past my door

I’m taking my time for a number of things
that weren’t important yesterday
and I still go

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
and stops my mind from wandering
where it will go
where it will go
I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
and stops my mind from wandering
where it will go

A dear friend died two years ago, almost to the day.  I’ve been thinking about him, looking at his picture, and holding the resurgent grief inside.  Old Polish Catholic that I am, I try to repress my feelings, which are after all just self-indulgent.  Your story about J. made the tears break loose. 

Your kid would have turned out just fine.

Jeremy, the nowhere man, had a hole in his pocket to help navigate through the sea of holes; and then they realized how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall.  The Beatles must have liked swiss cheese.

Wow, whatever I expect a blog posting to be, this sure exceeded that expectation.  I got here via Peter’s link at Slowreads.  Thanks for the sharing and writing.  I got a little vicarious yardwork in too (I live in the city and haven’t replanted a shrub in a decade...).