On the Shoreline of a Crystal Sea

Dear Reader,

I’m back.

I might have gotten some molecules scrambled, passing through the thick mist that descended over my life the past few days, but can still move my fingers and feel my toes. It’s enough to keep on going, even though right now I am really hungry for some sunlight to burn off the fog of death.

Outside my window, while we were gone, Alexandria filled the trees along King Street with white Christmas lights. Jess and I had just come back from a weekend spent with death, with dark thoughts, my own rampant imagination putting every face I cared about in a coffin and burying them in the cold earth, and I can’t describe what it was like to come home and find our tree-lined street illuminated with a million twinkling stars hanging overhead. Jessie’s first thought was that she wished her Grandmother had seen it so illuminated, our new home warm, inviting, and timeless.

I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t have been so upset for someone else’s grandma. I mean, I have my own grandparents. Jess and I aren’t married. I knew Gran well but we’d only seen one another a precious few times. And yet I was a total wreck on the drive up, at the viewing, at the funeral. I cried, like I will for my own grandmother, for all the new memories I didn’t get to make. And now I’m sitting at work, and I feel different. Uncomfortable. Waiting. I feel like I could die at any second, or those around me could die at any second, like it’s a war being waged around me and my weapons are my breath and my heartbeat, and I have limited ammunition. As long as I can keep firing, I’ll live, keep the hunter at bay, but right now I feel persecuted, invaded, and unsure.

The worst parts of it are the big questions. You know the ones you asked as a kid? “Where do we go when we die? Will I get to see my family again? What will I look like as a spirit?” Yeah, well, they don’t go away. They get louder, angrier, more infuriating. Jess and I found ourselves asking them again, only this time we were furious at our inability to know. I wanted to torch the veil and peer beyond it, burn a hole in the not-knowing, the not-being-able-to-know of it. And then my rational mind, who is an unemotional problem-solver, said, “You know, the simplest way to explain Heaven is that we invented it to make ourselves feel better about dying.” And I had those kinds of thoughts, one after the other. I’d present my old answers, my ones featuring God and St. Peter and mystical gardens and saints and the smell of roses filling the bedroom – all the artillery my own grandmother gave me - and one by one they fell under the crushing weight of my disbelief. Religion was no help. All death did was ask questions for which I have no answer, and I feel like I’m vulnerable to attack.

So, it’s weird. This whole weekend has been weird. I saw her body. I touched her cold hands. I laid a flower on her casket. And yet it feels like she’s still alive, and all we buried was the car she was driving. Is it weird to say that it felt like she was at her own funeral? I got the image of her sitting in a chair, snoring, which is exactly what she would have been doing during the service. Jess said she felt like her grandmother’s hand was on her shoulder. I prayed to her to watch over Jessie. Part of me accepts that as perfectly true, and another laughs and goes, “You’re kidding, right?” I remind myself that I can’t explain, well, much of anything going on around me. You ask enough questions and you get to a point where not only do you not know, you can’t know. Mat called it the ant and the bulldozer. All the ant knows is that the ground is shaking. He doesn’t know why, nor can he. He’s just an ant (all I could picture was a little ant getting squashed by a big bulldozer that didn’t care at all, and the more I thought about it the sadder the analogy seemed). He can’t perceive the greater truth that the bulldozer is there to build a condo for people to live in, etc... etc…

Jess and I stopped at Mom’s house on the way back from Erie, and my sister and her kids were there, along with Derrick. I have the coolest nieces and nephews in the world. They are absolutely at that fun stage when their self-critical voices are an undeveloped squeak and they haven’t learned to be bashful about saying and feeling exactly what is on their mind. I was holding my niece Mariah (who delights in raising her arms, looking through you and saying firmly, “Up!”), and suddenly I started to tear up. I held her little soft body close to me, my hands as big as her whole back, and felt an overwhelming desire to laugh at all her jokes, applaud all of her goofy creations, and make her feel like she was the center of the whole, happy world. I must have glimpsed a little of what a parent or grandparent feels in that moment, this sense that you exist now to ensure this little life makes it up and out into the world. To hold new life after so much talk of death was like clear bells ringing out over a foggy morning. It seemed that much more precious, that much more urgent to do the things I felt like doing in my heart and most importantly to spend time with the people that I love. I’m glad the holiday is almost here. It gives me the perfect opportunity.

I held my new nephew, too. Sean Christian. He’s just a little bigger than my hand. He’s just learning to see, the first rays of light travelling from his eyes to his brain. I wonder what it is like, that constellation of information suffusing your waiting synapses, everything firing for the first time as though it had been waiting for eternity to do so. I got the image of Gran as a candle that, having burned brightly for a long time, went out and, hundreds of miles away, a new candle was lit, was just starting to perceive the brilliant lights of this world. Maybe that is what death feels like – a birth into a constellation of new light that cannot be seen with the eyes of this world.

I met with Mat on Saturday night. I headed over to Squill and met him for an impromptu meeting at Eat’n Park, Pittsburgh’s answer to iHop. We talked about death over chocolate cake and a bowl of chili. I didn’t agree with much of what he said, but in his defense I didn’t agree with much of what I was saying, either. I just felt completely out of sorts, wholly not myself, and was glad to have the company. He is a bright light himself, and he burned off much of the mist that had settled around me. My mom burnt off more the next morning, and today, sitting at work, I can feel it slowly lifting. I admit I’m excited to have the old sun rise again. I could use the sight of some familiar light on the new eyes that death has given me.

Your,
Martin