Tomorrow, I will offer a memorial service for someone I had wished would never die. For a kind of person that doesn't happen twice on this earth. And here I am, admitting that I lost something that cannot be found, not whole, not in the way I have known it. And tomorrow, I will be called to tell my family something comforting. But some parts of death cannot be smoothed over the way we smoothed a loved one's arm in the hospital. Periods at the ends of sentences are non-negotiable. I cannot rewind. Not for anyone. Not even for myself, with all my strength. Not even for a moment.
Tomorrow, I will tell my family that he is not all gone, he is here, in us, in the wind, in the trees, in spirit. But I need to admit that he is not here. Not in his body, not at our dining room tables, not in our arms anymore. And no matter how much he swirls around us in the breezes or falls around us in the leaves or the rain, his arms aren't around us, and I cannot find words pretty enough to make that seem ok. Or even to make that seem reasonable.
I believe there are large parts of us that are children who are confused and scared by the cosmic peak-a-boo game of death. If I cannot see you, you must not be there. And I don't know where you could have gone, where so much of something could go, so quickly. Where a part of my heart went. And the word death offers no kind of explanation. It is just a word we agreed upon, just so we could call it something, so we can pretend we understand it at all.
And tomorrow, I stand up at his grave, and I say, I don't know where he went but let's all look for him together. Let us check by the fig tree in his Brooklyn yard, let's look in the restaurants by the hot pepper shakers, let's all go to Atlantic City and listen for his shouts, and check the kitchens in his sons' houses, and every boardwalk, and every orchard and warehouse, and then in the evenings, we will listen to our own hearts beating and see if we can make out his heartbeat alongside.
And he may not be in any one place. We may have to gather him up. Like little gifts hidden in between things. Gifts we can't take or hold or keep or put together. Just the kind you see in passing, the way you see a lightening bug, then immediately question if you saw it at all. Just a little flash of light, here, and now there. A thing that shines for a moment, then disappears into the dark.
