Unnoticed, grace is acquired. When we tend to those that meander towards death; when we care for those that are older than ourselves, with patience and a love that insists, that despite the fading strengths the life shall go on as easily as possible never drawing notice to the wane, we learn grace here.
It is a privilege to care for another human being as they slowly prepare to leave. It teaches us about life and it steadies us for our own demise. It is how we practice our own death.
Death is hardest on those that are left behind. On those who must continue without the beloved. Now is the time when we begin to shuffle through our memories. Taking one out of the deck and placing it back leaving it there until it perhaps means something more profound later. Placing importance on the memories that will remain 'as is' since there is no more time to go back, to change. We will rummage through our memories finding long forgotten wisdoms, we will search our own faces recognizing the beloved. The best moments will be when you remember the absent ones and you are laughing hard. This may seem an impossibility in your encompassing grief, but the joy will return. You will hear the beloved's voice when he or she has something to say about a situation only they would understand. It will be a kind of private joke between you two. You will reach for a glass or chop an onion and your very own hands will be the departed's for a moment. The light from a late afternoon will fall just so on nothing in particular but it will remind you of the gone one, the father, the lover, the man, the woman, the friend, perhaps a child. That is how the dead go on. That is how they stay close. That is how the living get comfort from the beloved gone. Remember your stories of those gone. Repeat them often, make them grander with each telling, pass these tales on to new ears, the dead are reanimated in the telling.
Another generation received and depended upon sympathy cards that were read, fondled, placed about and stayed collecting dust until such a day came when the grieving said “Enough!” and threw the whole lot away ready to go on if only on still wobbling legs. When you leave the funeral, the memorial that gathering of loving people sent to distract, go knowing that the grief begins in earnest for those choking on tears. These wee ones, the ones left alone, (through no choice of their own), these wee ones will still need a hello, a how you doing?, a word about your day, an ear to listen to their trickling melancholia. If you find yourself needing to talk to someone, call on them, the sad are often pleasantly jolted when they feel needed. Cajole, listen and coax but do not abandon them in their newfound status of solo They are struggling to become accustomed to a different life without that person they had so long called my beloved.
There was a moment in time when I witnessed my father vulnerable. He had rented a car and parked it outside my apartment in Brooklyn. He was not feeling well and had asked to stay with me and my then boyfriend, Eric. He slept for days on end and I really don't have any recollection of talking to him while he was with us. This is important to this narrative because I have always lamented the fact that I seem to have spent relatively little time with my father. I have snapshot memories of being with him - here and there, here and there. I am a teenager and he drives me into San Francisco, hands me money while he waits in the car, and I go in and buy some shoes. There are the times we drove the few blocks necessary to get to Baskin Robbins for ice cream over on University Avenue a few blocks up from his home in Palo Alto. There were lots of family reunions but I don't have any memories of being alone with my father, having a conversation or discussing anything. He did however ca...
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