An Epilogue to Death
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Without the web of pain and loss, we wouldn’t know the magnitude that love holds when you need it the most.
To process the lives I have lost, the only way I know how, is to document. I do this by ripening my seeds of perspective on the page in order to share them as sprouting ideas with the intent to plant something within the reader. At the very least, to ask you to look up and see that our pain looks quite the same from across the room.
Grief may be the one thing we can all relate to so readily. And if that’s the irony in this life, then all we can do is sit down together and discover the verses of laugher between the long notes of uncertainty…
And let it sing.
I’ve seen the formalities of death in the western world
unfolding in ritualistic rhythms.
Wooden coffin, wake, weep.
Tidy and controlled,
not unlike the way we manage our lives before sickness interludes.
I’ve seen cancer rock the bodies of too many,
the victim,
and those who stood close by in an attempt to fasten hope from fading spirits and sick interiors,
Grandma Shirley, Uncle Bobby, Grandpa Hooson.
I’ve seen the unexpected tragedy of a teen death in the family,
the kind that shakes you in the night and forces even the atheists to fold their hands in pledged prayer.
In our family, hospitals have failed to see a mother survive childbirth,
only one of them came home that day,
a handful of human that would never know his own life-giver,
Infant skin, bassinet, fathers’ son.
I’ve tried to understand the intricacies of these losses—their lessons and their messages,
through my own written stories, through philosophy, Buddhism, Catholicism.
But there aren’t enough theories, explanations,
or even enough grace from the god’s to take the hearts’ hurt away.
For a mother’s wounds are impenetrable,
a white scar on a rouged heart.
I’ve been alone when these deaths were announced to me, via phone, while I sat idly by, a thousand miles away.
Words in thin air. Finality. Fate?
These losses are the complex beauty of nature that chokes tears from my eyes,
Look, breathe, reach for solid ground.
The only thing to do was go towards the ones left alive,
Drive. Run. Fly.
I have seen the embrace of another human’s unconditional love permeate the pain,
the grip of an ‘I love you’ late at night after they tell you he is gone,
it makes the sorrow soften even if just a degree.
I have seen cousins, fathers, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, clasp one another in the hallway of the morgue
drama subsides and the heart becomes the priority
for healing is better done with them than alone.
I wouldn’t know what unconditional love was until I lost my cousin, my second cousin, and my grandparents.
For they taught me compassion through absence and would lead me to the very people that I was born from,
they are where I would begin to heal,
alongside ones who share my blood,
For they would demonstrate the strength of a viking with flowers in their hands.
They showed me what OK looked like after burying a child—and a mother.
This artful act alone revealed their unrelenting strength,
and this is what may heal me still from the tragedies to come.
I have stood at the podium of churches, from Colorado to Clinton,
speaking hand-written words aimed to secure the split souls that sat before me.
They chose me to be the one to make the tragedy a reality,
by giving a speech, a eulogy,
a cast of sentiments meant to heal and honor.
A gift, a burden…my voice.
I had to hold my breath and hide my shaking hands behind my back so I could look my father, Donna, Scott, Debbie and Jesse deep in the eyes,
under the chapel’s glow,
I told them it was love that brought us here and it is love that will move us from here.
Stitched words, sourcing hope, I’m so sorry.
In order to heal, we draw inspiration from our own relationships,
telling a brief history of stories we carry,
from our childhood that bathed us in innocence,
and rest unaffected by our adult hardships.
Spoken out loud were my words woven from a soft heart and a humble mind.
Death will do that to you,
break you until you become more alive in your own skin,
soften until your emotions soothe like salt water,
surrender until you feel the ripples of life on the edges of your fingertips and in your beating corazón.
For me, post-death encounters have brought me a hardened reality far from gleaming,
at first, nothing holds me steady,
weak and immune to any pleasure.
But half way through the heart break, I feel myself becoming more awake
The blood thickens around my chest as I clench harder at life’s small moments,
the one’s that would otherwise go unnoticed.
To honor Will, I have cemented his memory on the surface of my body,
Tattooed skin, needle & ink.
I have planted olive trees, painted canvas, and written until my hurt becomes art.
I have traveled far to visit their graves,
and will continue to do so until my own ashes are planted in the land adjacent to theirs.
I speak with angels on a daily basis
because I know we are not alone.
Ballena’s, dandelion and colbri’s.
Nature presents to us a post-death resurrection,
a reminder of soul permeating skin,
where the forgotten spirit of self comes swimming to the surface,
to be seen, felt, heard,
and set free.