tw: death, grief, cancer, suicide
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I've been thinking a lot about death lately. It's hard not to, not in this time of the pandemic, when the world is just brined in endless loss. These last few years have felt a little like drowning, like threading water.
Someone I knew died about two weeks ago. More recently still, a friend reminded of an anthology I wouldn't have been in had it not been for the involvement of another friend. That other friend is gone now, dead from cancer. I think of him almost every other day, wondering how he'd react to the world we live in now, if he'd have been annoyed, if he would have found ways to rally people to make a difference.
I miss him. I miss them.
I think a lot about people who I lost when I was in my teens, how I'm old enough now to be their mothers. I think about my father, dead from suicide. I think about my uncles (starvation, liver failure, AIDS). My grandfather (old age) and how I'll always remember how he smelled: rain-tumbled orchids and a whiff of cigar smoke.
The dead are never really gone.
We're all haunted by our dead. The difference between reality and fiction is that our ghosts aren't tied to one place, one object. When we die, we fractalize. A version of us goes on to live in each and every person we've touched. We become examples of who to be or who not to be: guides, warnings, symbols. And if we're very lucky, we are a comfort.
I read Carlos Hernandez's I Will Have This Heart For a Diamond when it came out, and promptly burst into tears. On Friday, I listened to Carlos read it live, and cried again by the end of the reading.
It's short, so I won't say more except that it is perfect, that it speaks wisely about legacy and love and how one feels when the years dwindle, when they've fallen away, and there's no recourse but to meet what's coming. That it feels like being held close at a funeral. (Like the benediction of a kiss on the top of your head when you're tongue-tied from grief, and can barely breathe through the loss.)
In tone, it reminds me of this poem:
Epitaph - By Merrit Malloy
When I die
Give what's left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.
Look for me
In the people I've known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.
You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn't die,
People do.
So, when all that's left of me
Is love,
Give me away.
Hernandez's I Will Have This Diamond For a Heart feels almost like a companion piece to C.S.E Cooney's Longergreen, which I've recommended before, and will recommend again and again until everyone I know has read it and wept and been restored by how perfect it is.
Longergreen is in Cooney's latest collection Dark Breakers, an original piece for the book, and it is, without spoiling anything, about a widow at the end of her days, one seeking with quiet urgency to fulfill her spouse's last wishes. The POV character is everything I want to be when I am old. She is gracious, she is wise, filled still with a feral joy in the world; she is grateful for the love that she has been given, and though she grieves those she has lost, she honors them with her humor and her memory.
(I will not spoil the rest but here, have my favorite paragraph from the story:
And it was I who couldn't help running my hands through it, kissing the curls I twined about my fingertips. He'd looked up at me with those sharp black eyes beaming fiercely, and I knew he loved me, resented leaving me, but he was just so tired. He was awake when he died, his hand knotted in mine. He'd bring it to his lips from time to time, dreamily. The last time, he pressed my hand to his face, and sighed.
It was good. If a death can be good, I can say that now.)
Longergreen tells its readers that love is immortal and that though people die, love does not. It simply changes shape. If we're lucky, it becomes a ghost that haunts the people we leave behind, one who brings comfort, one who says, "I am gone but we had so very, very many good years together, didn't we?"
Anyway.
I hope you're having a good Sunday, wherever you are.
As always, a cat picture (this time with a bonus Cass):
Grief has been a central part of my life since my sister passed a year and some ago, and this gave me some confort. I will definitely pick up those books!
That was lovely, thanks for sharing.