Gone

Laden with the messages of love from her many family members all around, but tired of just breathing, she left. The conversation continued among those remaining, but not with her. She was gone, is gone, will be gone. This is the hard realization that gripped my friend yesterday.

We say 'you' until the moment when we're talking not to someone who might be listening, but to a body. Then, 'she' is the right pronoun. Except the place so freshly vacated continues to invite address: you, my dearest, my loved one, my mother, you at the center of how I came to be in the world, you. As a beacon, we may forever call the departed 'you'.

I bought some zinnias at the store the other day, shamefully wilted from lack of water. Here, drink this, I said, holding the hose to the lips of the soil. Drink deep. Overnight, the slack flowers, the limp leaves stiffened up and the plants looked perky again. Revival, but not resurrection.

Resurrection is such a cartoonish concept. How it actually might work, whether it would be worth working at all are questions that take us quickly into unfamiliar, perhaps fictive, territory. The posited world to come of God-in-love and the beloved Other provides a framework, but only just, for the imagination.

Reading Music, the Brain and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain over the last few day, an idea struck me that extends the notion of the lastingness of darings and deeds of friendship, hospitality and exploration. What if the deep structures of our lives, corresponding to deep patterns of melody, harmony and rhythm in the most grandly conceived music, say that of Beethoven, are how our presence persists. What if our encounters, like single passages, connect with each other in ways that, altogether and over time, on larger and deeper scales, portray us, are in fact the infinite essence of us, forever sounding. Our identities: a kind of music, unique, profound, a source of everlasting joy.

Maybe the music of she who slipped away, in days to come, is still heard; perhaps better and better heard if deeply listened for, the music of our lives alluding to it; and, who knows, one day finally fully heard, distinct among all the many others, in glorious clarity.

Spider, which I yesterday admired stepping along on the other side of the shower curtain and  today flushed down the toilet, you and I may not be in concert on these matters. But I'm ready to grant the existence of your music if you would have it, so that, in some way, the whole cosmos may sing.

Concerning your loss, my friend, may you be consoled as you grieve.