I can feel the force of the grief, another small tragedy. His death, like his life, will be a small story, buried beneath bigger fires, the roiling of big boy fights, what is the death of one little boy when the world is burning?
Everything.
His life was everything
To him
And to the One who stood at the field of Heaven
Waiting all those days to welcome him home
Wipe away every tear
No more crying
No more pain
You say the sweetest things
A soft answer turns away wrath
Love is always patient
What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts
One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-
The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w
What if that were a word by itself
And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only
No power only soft and aging
No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one
Just this one last spell-
Let the word when spoken
Set us free from past and illusion
Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-
Oh fragile love-
You say the sweetest things
It was a simple thing
The man reached in and snapped off the treadmill
Came in very close to the boy’s face
Told him “the rules”
Only it turned out “the man” didn’t know the rules as well as he thought he did
Rules like the way a single pebble can make a concentric circle across the whole chest of a river
Or the way the question about what you would do with a time machine
Might just define a person
Forever, forever is how wide and how deep and how long I will
Love you like a pebble
Thrown right at the heart
Of moving water.
Like a time traveler, Lazarus returns, sits with me on the steps of the old San Antonio house
We hug our knees together, the way children do
I tell him my losses
And he tells me his founds
–you never forget the way
Dim shadows turn to light.
It is 4:53 in the morning and the-multiverse-you is sleeping somewhere
(Perhaps held in the arms of her beloved)
…she does not know about the foster children, or the loss, the things you use to distract you
From the sound of being cracked open
a meal, a primitive marine creature–a crab, a lobster, a clam
The oral surgeon calls the missing piece of you by the kind of nickname you might use for a lovable but naughty child—that little stinker or cuss or rascal
Only, the-multiverse-you tells it as though it were a puzzling but mildly discomfiting dream
No mention, no hint even
Of global dishevelment and chaos on the planet where she sleeps,
untouched
As you fiddle with various words for comfort to mask the pain
In all the broken places.
When I was dealing with the trauma of finding out that a little boy I had taken in as a toddler had grown up to become a terrible person I
Had three things
I decided to use as grief-points:
Get a nose ring
Shave my head
Get a tattoo.
This week I have had to face that sometimes “a tattoo” is a luxury item
In a pandemic
In the way grief
Can worm its way into the fabric of who a person is
I am losing something else
Like a tattoo, a marker of the grief
And I found what I would put on that tattoo–
Love is
Unmistakable
You name it
The thing you will lose
Have lost
Are losing
Give it a fictional name
Tell Quint not to wait for you
Because this grief
Is just killing time
I know something about being pregnant in a crisis. My heart goes out to any women who are facing a pregnancy in the midst of economic hardship and fears of Covid-19.
If you or someone you love needs support or prayers. Please leave a comment and let me know how I can help.
I can’t stop thinking about how he lets us
Draw pictures in the wet cement
Our little hands, our squiggly messages
No one would call this art
But they might call it
Mine, fierce love
Carrying Light 