Burying our dead

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

The rain comes, more like fall than February but it is a gift on this misty morning, the moistening of the earth that allows the lines of reality to blur.

The Staten Island woodchuck did not see his shadow and so promises us an early spring when we have not even seen winter yet -- at least not much of it.

Today is Louise's birthday; she turns 70, a shocking number for those of us who have spent our lives growing up together and thinking the future would never come and that we would never grow old.

All of this is overshadowed by my best friend's death and the politics of finding a place in the earth to put him or no place at all -- dust to dust which gets lost in the wind and leaves with nothing solid to mourn.

I am unnerved buy it all and this made by the inability of those who survive to properly follow the necessary rituals for burying those who have passed on.

Instead, we get the promise of a three-ring circus with which to mourn his passing months after the excruciating pain of the original loss, tearing open the wound again long after we should have healed, after burying him in the earth for him to heal, bowing our heads, saying our prayers, moving on with our lives.

I do not want to relive his dying a second time.

Yet, I begin to understand the chaos that surrounded my best friend’s life, the insanity of companions that have historically failed to embrace the rituals of living and dying, and how

we need to observe them in order to carry on and to instruct the next generation on how they should behave at these times of loss.

Instead of allowing us to grieve, we will get a sideshow; we will gather and do what we have always done -- play act some ritual that we really don't mean down deep.

Perhaps all wakes are mostly sideshows. Perhaps this is the reason why I have always been on the periphery of this  insane social set that surrounded my friend, watching the insane conflict from the boundary of this friendship, never getting too deeply involved, knowing that it is easy to get sucked up into it and lost forever.

What seemed like comedy in the past turns to tragedy this time of my life, and I do not want to play my part in this Shakespearean melodrama.

Perhaps if I survive, I will look back at this the way I look back at all of the simpler moments the past and see how comic they really are when viewed from the cosmos.

But that moment isn't now, and it won't be soon; I am too busy burying the dead who the ashes cannot be buried and remembering the face of someone whose features have been blurred by ineptitude of the survivors rather than just rain.

if this is a circus let me not be in the center ring.

I will mourn my friend's death in my own way and leave others to mourn him in theirs.