Friday, June 20, 2014

Friday Beach Report (yeah, I know it's dark now, but this is how it was)



this morning's harvest

The islands a well-kept secret.
Ocean stretching to the edge of nowhere.
The beach its own sea of pebbles.
Sea glass everywhere.


And there was the trip  to the county recorder's office to pick up Dan's death certificate. His daughter and I went together. Most of the people in line seemed to be there for marriage licenses. Not us. Check it over,  the clerk said. Be sure everything is correct. That's how I saw my name. There I was, half-way down, listed as "significant other." My name not spelled exactly right, but oh well. Significant. It seemed like an honor to be listed there.

On and off all day I thought of grief. Is it like an ocean, vast and deep? A mountain one must climb to get to the other side? For now, I've settled on crater. I'm not even sure I'm at the bottom--or still slipping downward. I make runs at the slope out. I do things. Patio clean-up down. Haze buffed from a section of the fireplace. Artwork from Dan's place re-hung here. A cookbook of his shelved with my own. A merging  of households. Significant.

4 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

Gosh that glass is gorgeous. So are your toenails.
A crater? Yes, that is good. Something very deep. A cenote, a sinkhole, there is perhaps no bottom but of course, there is. It can be cold.
There can be beauty.
You are beautiful. You are choosing beauty.

37paddington said...

Definitely significant. Somehow, not other. Your time was too short. I'm sorry. A crater is a good analogy. Take comfort in the sky.

A.Smith said...

I have just found about your loss and I know, and feel for you for what you are going through and what you will be going through.

Give in to your grief, there is no escape and none that would be safe. Wrap yourself with your memories, at times you will think it is worse but believe me, doing so will bring him back to you even if it hurts to relive what we will never have again. Some will tell you it will get better. It won't. It will get different, but it cannot get better unless your Beloved is back with you.

Get yourself a usb hard drive and copy every single thing with his voice and his music into it. You will never regret it. Of all the things that are ephemeral none can begin to approach words when spoken. Make sure an electronic glitch does not take away the gift of his voice and his music from you. It is hard to believe that for such a rich, filled with love, laughter, poetry and passion life together, all we have left is that.

Memory is frail and it needs to be helped along the way. I live for the little love notes I still find in the big freezer, and for the "Hi beautiful, coming home" from the old answering machine and I would gladly give the rest of my life for that to be true. There are wounds that cannot heal, but there are memories that some times can, and I hope yours would too, make the wound hurt less because somehow the ones who loved us and who we loved as never thought possible, still there. Their essence at least. And to survive maybe that should be enough.

Anonymous said...

Tears. This beautiful picture of the process. And your sea glass, beautiful.