Forever 21

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

I am between those lands and I feel like nothing’s happening but maybe something is going on and I need to be patient. I am missing Philip and that missing is tinged with hopelessness. He is not coming home. I am a mother whose child has died. It’s been sickening me again – whatever’s spinning around my gut makes its way to my chest and arms and just for a moment I think I’m going to fall down, that I can’t bear this.

But then there’s Philip, all around me, always all around me. I just have to pay attention. There isn’t a day that goes by that he isn’t nudging me. How graced am I? And how my life has opened up since he died. I left the hellish job I was at, and now work at a place I like to go to (most of the time). I have more people in my life than I had before. I finally started to write, and to stay with it. So many years – decades – I had fits and starts with writing. And years that I wanted to start a blog but was afraid. What could I possibly have to say? And if I had something to say, what made me think I could write it in a way that would make anyone want to read it?

Philip said, “let me be the voice in your head.” Because his is the voice of love. He would never talk to me the way I talk to myself, the way I learned from my mother. My mother, who cannot help who she is. I grew up nursing on her rages instead of her love. Witness to her preference for my brother, her disdain for me. And so hurt, angry and helpless as I was – as any child would be – I took my first drink at 11 and thought I found what I was looking for. Something to make me feel nothing because I’d rather feel nothing than feel what it felt like to be alive.

I have been remembering more often to replace that voice with Philip’s. I bought prayer beads to help. Not because I want to pray with them, but because they help me pay attention. They are beautiful copper beads flecked with gold, and have silver tassels They feel cool and weighty in my hands. I carry them around and every time I touch them I think, “Let Philip be the voice in my head.”

But that bridge Wilder talks of – I can’t find it. My heart’s not open. Back and forth I go between the fact that Philip’s died and the fact of how he lets me know he’s still here. What does his death mean in my life, what besides loss in a way I have never known? May I never know it again.

It’s such an odd way to live, this between-ness.  So much thinking going on here, so much “assessment” of my situation. Where does it get me? At the moment it feels easier to let it all go and just suffer. Then I can’t feel the love that comes at me from many different directions. Feeling it is also giving it – and what are we here for, if not to learn that?

How do I stop reacting like the small hurt child I was? I needed to be loved – I am never going to get what I needed back then, so it’s up to me to find what I need now. All I have to do, really, is look to my life, look to the people who matter, and let myself take it all in. And I take that little child I was and imagine myself at three, with my too-short bangs, wavy brown hair, big hazel eyes, pale yellow chiffon party dress, black patent leather shoes, finger in my mouth, being held by Philip. I imagine it because that is what it means to know love. That is what he’s trying to give me.

Love is not like the things of this world. It is not a transaction. It doesn’t get won, it doesn’t get lost. And it’s not diminished by giving. If I give it, I have it. It starts with me. With my ability to recognize that life is best lived in love. When do I feel peace? When I’m with love. Like I am with Natalie and Philip. With Ed. With the women in my life, old and new. With the quilts I’ve made and the cakes I’ve baked. These are works of love.

I am not speaking of what passes for “falling in love” which involves a significant other and in time is often revealed to be something very different. The love I’m speaking of is a state of being. And we desire to express that love. We think we need an object. We don’t. It’s true that people, animals, beaches and sunsets inspire us. Objects can loosen our sore and jaded hearts and let love through the cracks. If we can feel it, then we have it. But I have to ask – where does love go when nothing inspires me? When I feel alone? When nothing matters and I sit on my couch, look at Philip’s portrait and cry for want of him. It’s not love that’s moved, it’s me.

The bridge is love. That simple. So why is it so hard? I have two ways of thinking about Philip. One feels like I lean back in his love, one feels like I look ahead and see him gone. Lately I’m transfixed by what’s ahead, which means I’m imagining all the ways it stuns me that Philip won’t be here. Not in the way I want him to. Lately I’m blowing off his attention and retreating into what it feels like to have had him yanked from me, put into a navy blue suit in a coffin, then sent to a crematorium to spend two hours in a cremation container at 900 degrees so that he could be returned to me as a bunch of grey ash and bone fragments.

And guess what? Life kept on going. People brushed their teeth and straightened their ties and chose the right shoes to match their outfits and I did not understand. I knew there was so much more going on, things that arent’ seen and so feel lost. They are not lost. We who lose those we love walk differently. We cannot live in the world the same way, though we seem to. We are not even sure we want to be part of this world, but the reality is we are. So we have to find a way to bridge the gap. Or we can live in rage and hate, in despair, for what was “done” to us, when really, nothing at all was done to us. People’s dying is not done to us. What to do with that? To think about death we must move beyond vanity. Because all the money we make, all the things we buy, all the exercise we do and all the botox we shoot is not going to change the fact of death. We will die and if we’ve any hope of leaving this world without rage and fear, now is the time to work toward that. Philip once told me that I might think I want to die, but I am not ready. The way I live is the way I will die – if I live in fear, so will I die. There’s no magic that will make dying okay if living never felt the same. And I have much to do to make living feel the same.

© 2016 Denise Smyth