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Loss is a kaleidoscopic unfolding, not a single spark of darkness: a ghost story or spirited haunting, memory’s refusal to yield.
Such refusal is heartening and discomfiting both, accruing with time, the loved one frozen in their death date. The shadow of the missing one follows us forward: one who might witness and understand the significance of current events: a framed mirror with the glass removed.
My late father passed before I got married, published my first book, and adopted my daughter, Lucy. I am sure the two would have hit it off, a grandfatherly glint in his eye (I imagine), even if such twinkle was scant while I was with him.
Time heals nothing; loss endures; one merely adjusts to the silent howl of absence, an empty echo we seek to fill.
The intensity of grief is proportionate to the void left by departure, we want to say; such void also constitutes our own unfulfilled seenness in the eyes of caregivers, crucial recognitions immeasurably lost; such losses also accrue.
Last year we said goodbye to my father-in-law Leo, who buoyantly filled the dark space of paternal absence, until he too faded into stillness, amidst the dreaded “flatlining” drone of monitors. Shortly after that came the loss of my friend Gene, that “brother from another mother,” with whom I had nothing in common except everything: a fellow clinician, vaudevillian of spirit (we sensed this immediately), a regular in the oncology ward, tragically: the impossible shutting down of a life, reaching its end after many years of graceful, gritty resistance.
Shit.
Who could possibly take their place? Perhaps nothing but the nighttime scratches of branches, nails against the glass, trees bobbing in the blowing Santa Anas.
It seems impossible to stop the seeking of such pillar-like reflections, the touchstones of intimate gazes, the urge to people our empty mirrors with the achingly familiar—a reflection of empty yearning stubbornly unsatiated, the open maw of grasping.
My sister Andrea’s jarring absence (13