When you say goodbye to someone you love it’s a knife’s edge between the past and present. They are both with you and not. It can feel like the amputee’s phantom limb or Schrödinger’s cat, the seam between seasons when summer and fall coexist, spring and winter. We fool ourselves into thinking it’s not this way and then we’re reminded each time we lose someone it is. Like Castaneda’s Don Juan said, death is the hunter: an adviser, ever present. There is no time for regrets or doubts, only time for decisions.

At no time in my life was this more poignant to me than the summer I spent in the south of France. Mom had a near fatal brush with cancer and concealed it from me. I was blissfully unaware, living alone in a condo facing the sea. Each day I walked the twisting road that connected her village from mine, a hill over the vineyards that dropped down onto her street. There was a high concrete wall along the sidewalk between me and the road and I never thought to see what was on the other side until the end of the summer. Sure enough, it was an above-ground cemetery, ornate granite mausoleums, loving touches for the dead. How funny, I thought: death was right here all along, just like it said in my book.

Our family cat went missing and after several days we acknowledged she wouldn’t be coming back. Charlotte invited her friends for a wake and we stood outside in the spot where the hot tub was in a circle with the dog in the middle and Charlotte reading her eulogy, a friend awkwardly holding the laptop as Charlotte read. We went around saying things but I had little to say and later regretted it; I’d worked through the pain in my own private way, secretly removing the scratching post, her food bowls, the cat nip. It wasn’t about the cat so much as it was everything else, all the loss in the pit of my gut, everywhere.

Lily left for Europe for a month with her boyfriend Blake and I waited with her in the den before Blake’s dad came to drive them to the airport. And then I pictured myself leaving for Europe my first time too, and how excited my mom would be to greet them at the airport, the same as they did those times she and Eberhard would come to greet me and Dawn, then later the four of us when the kids came. There was some natural progression to it all, the thought Lily would go on to explore Europe the way I had when I was younger. And next Charlotte would too. I imagined them in the plane flying over the pole and touching down, as Dawn and I had. And what we’d do together when Lily got back in late June.

I finished my book and lay on the sofa looking out. It had been a wet spring. Spider mites on the leaves of the rose bushes—everything bright green, dripping. By 5 in the morning it was bright enough at the trail head each morning I could walk through the woods alone, just me and the sound of the birdsong, drops of rain on the broad-leaf maples. I don’t worry about the bears though they are there in the woods, it’s the mountain lions or cougars: the ones you can’t see that I know are out there, that creep up from behind. More than once this week I imagined I heard the sound of something grunting or shifting in the brush off the side of the trail and had to keep looking over my shoulders the rest of the walk out. Even took to running, it had me so scared. It is always there, though we’d forget.

And I’m glad for the rain because soon it will be wildfire smoke and there will be a time we have both, and one wins out over the other. There is nothing disconnected or divided in any of this and the goodbyes are only temporary, the same as everything else.

Categories: death, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, existentialism, spirituality