Everyday I say Eric's name three times. I burn incense next to the jar of his ashes. I throw kisses at his pictures. I have a vase of flowers in the middle of all the mementos I've placed on the tv cabinet. I look at the road carved into the mountainside in Ash Canyon where the tree, standing tall above all the others, appears as a sentinel marking the spot where Eric took his last breath. How to go on? That's what I ask myself everyday. I have to remember I have a loving husband whose heart and bones, together with mine, created our sons. And to the brother and son left behind, I given up all my love, desires and wishes, for him to carry on for me as I don't have the desire to press ahead with them myself. There is no one in this world that I love more than my boys and husband. I would give anything to change places with Eric.
Flesh and blood is a powerful thing. Without the tangible, things are only as they are imagined. The world that exists outside the tangible is a mystery and sometimes a treacherous mountain to attempt to scale. I feel a great need to explore the unknown but I also wonder if I have the energy and desire. The despair I feel is debilitating and it seems the only time I can plug ahead is in the mundane tasks of daily living and of employment. Sometimes, the more mundane a task is, the more easily it is accomplished which is the exact opposite of what has sustained me over the course of the last couple of decades. The joie de vivre is now the joie de mort. One does not fear death when your child has gone before you. The only fear is that the living will not understand that the grief transcends the love you have for them. The experience of absence is not equal to the experience of presence. Absence is overwhelming. Presence is reassuring.
I do not understand this state of being which is the human life. What is the purpose of matter and energy coming together to form a being? Isn't there purpose in everything, or is all of this just a random physics experiment? How cruel to be given the experience of deep love and then have it taken away by some random act of probability. Any yet, the cruelest thing of all is to want answers to questions that no one can answer.
There are nights when I can’t sleep. It’s a kind of restlessness that starts in my legs. Sometimes it reaches up to my ears and I can hear my heart beating so loudly it makes me shudder. I’ve never told anyone this but I find it grotesque. I don’t like being conscious of the intricacies of my body. The breathing, the heart beats…. even the gurgling of my stomach as I digest my dinner. It’s a bit like studying the mechanics of a small machine. Most people would see each individual piece and be fascinated by the way each part moves together. When I look at it, I’m overwhelmed by the fear that at any moment one of those pieces can break or fail and the whole machine can come to a grinding halt.
ReplyDeleteMy life has been predicated by this fear. Eric’s was not. There is a kind of refuge in being oblivious to your own mortality. Yet, oddly, in what I’ve read of his dreams… he wasn’t oblivious to death at all. I think death and life were on the same spectrum for him. I don’t know what meaning there is to grasp from that, but I’m reminded every time I cry that I know what it feels like to love someone. It’s not always comforting. It’s raw. It gnaws at you. But within each of those moments of pain there are memories that fill me up so much that I feel like I’m going to bust at the seams.
Eric’s life makes my life worth living. I want him to be proud of me. I want to reabsorb his pieces and incorporate them into my life. I can’t do that if I stop. Don’t stop, either. There are still so many people who need you the same way you need him.