Oh, it seems that with your death, “our” way has been lost, with you not here to walk it with me , but really it’s more like you”re just spending more than your usual time on the other Coast!
But now , it really is THE OTHER Coast! I make myself laugh, as I imagine you in long white angel robes, your well-deserved wings arching gracefully from your tall athletic body….a joyous look in those warm brown eyes of yours, now that earthly worries have melted away.
At first, when you breathed your last, I felt like someone had taken a giant eraser on the end of an enormous pencil and disappeared all the images of your life…our life…your sister died shortly thereafter, so there was a sense of even more vast erasure as your family dissolved into the deathly mists of personal history.
Whoosh! One fell swoop….gone.like within the dastardly reach of some Shakespearean villain…wiped out so that history would be forced to bend another way than it was supposed to. Our history.
I was left literally speechless, the moment you passed…as a giant laryngitis covered my vocal cords … I could not utter a single word for three weeks after you left us.
There were no words. How could there be if my mind refused to admit that you were even gone…forever? Surely not forever. I kept expecting your tall self to enter whatever room I was in….it seemed only right that you would, as you had, all our years.
But no.
I see you clear as day . But it is not you…..though maybe it is..Shakespeare knew: we are such things as dreams are made of,etc….rounded in a sleep….old Will seemed to know a lot about a lot of things….
I wonder what sort of 5-act play he’d have made of us? Comedy?
(There was plenty of that!)…Tragedy? ( Oy! The pain!)
How about a History play?
With horses and swords and smoke and slaughter! ???
Right now, to be sure, it is a Ghost story, because since your earthly death, your spirit, in street clothes not angel robes, visits me most every night…..I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth ( how many classic tales can I shove into one writing?)…. So, no, I have not lost our way.
It’s just for now, the way is filled with endless fluffy clouds and just enough yearning for me to bear.