memory | noun |The things learned and kept in mind
August 9, 1997.
I always hated the way the pastel flowers on my comforter looked against the brown and rust shag carpeting covering most of my apartment. The phone on the floor is ringing. It’s early morning. I reach down, lift the receiver and croak: “Hello.”
Time links together seconds that turn to minutes and hours that become days and weeks and months and years. You would drive yourself crazy thinking about all the possibilities contained in a single second, but you’d also be a fool to deny its potential.
The words come fast, like he needs to get them out before he inhales them back in, swallowing what he knows without doubt will be marked as a defining moment in my life. I don’t remember the exact order, only highlights: “Very bad news,” “hit and killed.”
One second. Half marked by a sleepy hello; the other half a fissure, a small crack threatening a wide expanse.
“Very bad news” and “hit and killed” flood into mind where they are quickly stamped with denial. “No, no, no, no, no” I send back into his ear, south to his heart that wisely recommends silence, the absence of everything — time included.
The brown I’ve always hated closes in on me. My apartment feels too small. Outside, I pace, imagining that by simply putting one foot in front of the other I can stay ahead of that last half second, stop myself from dropping into the vast unknown of grief, stay where denial can reign without upsetting reality.
But alas, you know that’s not possible.
Half seconds merge, becoming one whole second, undivided, sleepy complacency muddled with a terror and sadness I didn’t think possible.
August 9, 2016
I slide the back off one of the pictures and look for the obituary I know is tucked inside. All those words that can’t possibly be expected to convey the value of one lifetime, no matter how impossibly short. Born, died. Surviving, survived.
Surviving, survived.
I’d never thought how apt a description that is, taking the task of grieving down to its barest essential: continuing to allow my heart to beat, breath to fill my lungs, one second to one minute to one hour to one day to one week to one month to one year over and over and over again.
But of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.
As with most of us, grief proves more complicated in character than her imagined obituary might suggest. All of her darkest imperfections are matched by a lighter tenderness that becomes more apparent as seconds become minutes become hours become days become weeks become months become years over and over and over.
I carried unbearable until I came to acceptance. I guarded despair while waiting for promise. I didn’t blink against the darkness until I saw a pinhole of light. I submitted to I have to until I want to took hold.
And that’s all grief’s domain, the territory she shares with you, sometimes against your will, until she can deliver you to something better than just surviving. All of her, in that one second, contradictory, both relentless and merciful until the landscape shifts and surviving becomes living.
Living.
I flip the picture back over and whisper, “I love you.”
I love you into this life that includes your death; one second allowing me to pull you from the past into the present without tying myself to misery, for all the minutes to hours to days to weeks to months to years and on and on and on.
