What We Talk About When We Talk About Grief (Part 1)

You had to do it that way, didn't you: alone in your apartment and alone in your chair until something inside you stopped or blew up, sitting there until your son found you two days before your birthday, two days before I sent you an email celebrating your new decade and asking what I should expect to see when I get there. Somewhere in your papers was a note to your family to find me if you died, and they did. That alone means more to me than anything. I have a similar note in my own papers, but now it's meaningless.

Your memorial service was wonderful; the church was full of people who stood and knelt and prayed in your honor--the Catholics, the Protestants, the non-believers, the skeptics. Your mother--bent and old and frail--was escorted down the aisle to where your daughter stood waiting, and when the two of them hugged your mother moaned aloud. I managed to hold myself together pretty well, though when your son and daughter carried the ashes and bones of you toward the front of the church, I wanted to be anywhere else--maybe on one of our trips to Chicago or San Francisco--and rather than watch the progression of your brass urn I stared down at the papers in my lap and stared at the picture your family had printed onto small bookmarks. I think now that you might have preferred a small box to a brass urn, because you always seemed more functional than flashy. Not long later a woman sang "Ave Maria," which must be a song for every Catholic ceremony because I heard it at my cousin's wedding, also. And I almost lost myself then, too, and so I watched the people across the aisle wipe their eyes.

In those 90 minutes I drifted between the past tense and the present. Remember Chicago, the bookstores and the bars, and visiting your cousin Henry, and the trip to my hometown where we walked against a cold wind so I could show you where I grew up? Remember the countless hours in San Francisco when we drifted into bookstores and bars and coffee shops, our conversations spread over 30 years and separated by semi-colons? Our kids grew up in parallel, and we could talk about them just as we talked the ebb and flow of our careers, our marriages, and the world around us.

The reception was crowded and noisy; pictures of you hung on the walls and documented much of your life. At one table were artifacts from your apartment: pens, hats, photos, your absurdly large glasses. And there was your can full of notes, too, a can of "bright ideas." I leafed through them and tried to imagine how those ideas would develop...or would have developed, perhaps. I also stole a couple of those notes--cupped them in my palm and slipped them into my pocket. I feel no guilt about this.

Two days later and things have set in harshly. You knew grief, so you know how it comes out of nowhere sometimes and smacks you hard. You were, really, the only audience for this drivel I've come up with in three decades I've pretended to call myself a writer, and now that audience of one has vanished. And, yes, that's a trace of self-pity, but I'm going to allow myself to embrace it for a while. Pure selfishness.

If you could read this, you'd of course understand the title. It might be one of the first literary connections we had. Remember when I visited Raymond Carver's grave in Washington, how I photographed the granite slab and sent the photo to you, and how you worked it and his poem "Gravy" into one of those many booklets you wrote? Here's another of Carver's poems, one we both liked. I have to end this way because I'm not original enough to come up with my own.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

It was a long, strange trip, wasn't it?