I am not yet among the dead of this world, scattered ashes or sunken corpse. Not yet discussed in past tense, not yet absolved at last rites.
I am still conscious of the leaves on the red maple, hanging on, like me, trying to express brilliance before the fall.
I wake up in soft, fresh cotton sheets and see the trees through the skylight turning toward the sun, and a bird scatters to the porch rail, just like she promised she would.
I can call my mother and say hello, talk to my siblings, laugh with people I have loved since I was nineteen, since I was twenty-five, grateful to have closed those gaps in our lives when we lost track of each other. Grateful to know what it’s like to be quiet and know peace. I can climb hills with my son, stop for lunch and talk about what is beautiful, talk about what is next.
For the peace that can only be found in life, that stillness of the soul that keeps us present. Yes, for that peace and stillness and presence, which one must be conscious of to understand.
For consciousness.
For the fox at the edge of the woods waiting for apple slices.
The veteran who stopped to see if I was okay.
The homeless man in Norfolk last week who let me help, which reminded me I could; his gift to me.
For having had the type of relationships—so close, so intimate and alive—so that when those souls died, my sadness which is alive still simply reminds me I have known such love, even briefly.
For the way the river still keeps tabs on my moods, washes clean the extremes which constrict my hopes, tugs me back to the Island, or off across the equator to distant mountains on the moon and then washes me ashore here on the edge of what’s next, giving me the strength to fight the tigers that come at night.
Thankful is a shallow word. There must be something better to express our gratitude for being alive, now, with the aroma of leaves, the chill at night pulling the skin taut on my face, the stars stretched out like compassion through the universe. Thankful is not enough.
To still be able to string together a battalion of words which might make someone cry when I remind them of a loved one or make someone laugh when they recall a moment they once knew but thought they had long ago forgotten.
For forgiveness.
For compassion.
For the way I feel when I reach for the phone to call someone who left this world before me, and my heart sinks, and my stomach drops, and I remember, and I put the phone down. For remembering that is another way you can measure love; you remember how you almost called anyway but then didn’t.
Thankful for the ones who see my mistakes and don’t give up on me.
For the soft touch of another soul who understands.
The Cup of Blood, a Gift from a Colleague in St Petersburg, Russia
I own a porcelain cup made in Russia in 1896. It is about four inches tall, white porcelain interior with blue and red markings. On the side is the seal of Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, and “1896,” the date of his coronation. A friend of mine in St. Petersburg gave it to me. The “coronation cups” were made for the occasion to be filled with beer and passed out to the masses of people outside the Kremlin walls so the peasants could celebrate along with the aristocracy. The military training field where half a million people gathered for the souvenirs of cups and various food and clothing items was already a dangerous place to walk for all the trenches and mud pits. But things quickly went south when a rumor spread that each cup had gold in it and there were not nearly enough of them to go around. The stampede left over 1700 people trampled to death. The cup became known as the “cup of sorrow,” so called by Alexandra herself, but it is more often referred to as the “cup of blood,” and the tragedy seemed a bad sign for things to come during the reign of the last Czar. I own one of only five hundred or so made.
As the Raiders of the Lost Arc character, French archeologist Renee Belloch, notes, “We are simply passing through history; this is history.” When I hold the cup in my hands and turn it over I wonder which guard, swarmed by people, handed it out, which peasant held it in her hands. I turn it over and realize the likelihood it was stepped on in the mud, or smuggled away quickly by some young worker who managed to escape the tragedy. It is one thing to listen to a history lecture about the event, and something else entirely to go to the Kremlin and hear the tour guide explain the events as you look out over the parking lots and office buildings on the once barren land, and imagine the droves of Russians pushing for the gates, their comrades crushed just for the cup, this cup.
I am not a history buff by any means, though I have toured many historical sites around the world. My own sister earned a doctorate in history from Notre Dame. Her husband, too, received his Ph.D. from there and is a leading historian at Temple University, author of countless award-winning works about military history, and it isn’t unusual to see his familiar face pop up on the history channel as commentator. Even my father knew so much about history he could have taught it in college, and in school he won a history award.
Me, not so much.
But I am a hands on guy fascinated by items that survived time and war and neglect. I need an object, a talisman of sorts, to bring history to life. When I hold the cup, my mind wonders what they were talking about before the stampede, what music were they listening to, was it an exciting time or, because of the conflicts already underway throughout the empire, was it subdued and the cup distribution simply a brief diversion. Who made the cups? For me, owning one is a way to reach through a rabbit hole and pull out some 19th century reality. Though I suppose it might also be considered moronic to have it in my possession and I should probably sell the damn thing on Ebay.
The irony is I have made so many trips to Russia for the purpose of experiencing culture that I became heavily steeped in history by virtue of immersion. Russians are deeply rooted in their tragic and beautiful past. In Prague it is the same. There, I stay in a building built almost 700 years ago and dine in former bomb shelters as well as a wine cellar used by Charles the IV in the 1300’s. I have no interest in reading about those times. I like to be in the present, walk the same hallways with someone like my brother-in-law to tell me what happened while I half listen and half focus on the immaculate trajectory of time, like an arrow, like a beam of light, like a falling star. Time remains relentless, and I like to hold the cup in Russia or lean against The Hunger Wall in Prague, or sit in a pew in a Spanish chapel prayed in by Charlemagne and contemplate the immediate reality that we are on the same line, standing between them and what’s next, isolating this moment. I am nobody, to be sure, but I am here, part of the conspiracy to keep those ages alive. Time can be like a relay that way. Observers grab the events of the past and pass them along to whoever’s next, and on. But while my sister and her husband are direct descendants of Herodotus, I like to consider myself the descendant of the barkeep who served up some honey mead for the evening gatherers who stood around and told stories and tried to pick up eunuchs.
History would be well served to have a bartender’s version as well as a scholar’s. We could bypass the normal reference material like dates and plans and titles and influences, and keep track of what they really thought, their insecurities, their ambitions. Who wouldn’t want to pour another hekteus of wine and listen to Aristotle rattle on about which Sophocles play bored him to death and which sent him reeling to his corner table after intermission to contemplate the center of the universe? What tender stood by with the bottle of chianti that got Galileo hammered, relegating him to the courtyard at three am on his drunk ass with a dizzy head, and as he lay on his back he looked up at the stars and thought, “Whoa, hang on here.”
I think I’ll let the others write history. Instead, I’m heading to this small oyster shack I know and have a dozen Old Salts and sit in the same place oystermen sat while Teddy Roosevelt was pounding up San Juan Hill, and I’ll talk to some fisherman about changes in the tides, and how some Bay islands used to be so much larger, before the storm of ’33, and before the one in ’03, and if you paddle out to them at low tide and work your way through the mud, you can still find hundred-year-old hand crafted beams, and abandoned hand-made traps. When I was a child on Long Island, we would find arrowheads. The Native American culture on the Island wasn’t solely history lessons in school books; it was lying around in the sand and marshes of the south shore.
If I drink enough at the oyster shack, I might stumble out to the patch of grass on the river and fall on my back and stare up at the stars and think about Galileo and Copernicus and who else lay still in the quiet of night, the faint sound of water lapping the shore nearby, and watched Orion’s belt loosen, or the Pleiades spread out like buck shot. Then I might go back inside and sit a few stools down from the cook sitting alone on the corner stool, and lean toward the tender and ask, “So what’s his story?”
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” –Emile Zola
I moved through several stages of grief in the hours and days following Election Day. Denial hung on a while, anger held court the longest, at about three am I woke up bargaining that it all be a dream, at five I woke up depressed, and at six I got up but instead of moving to acceptance, I back-peddled to anger again. Acceptance is a distant, blue ghost waiting in the shadows.
This is an appeal to my colleagues in the art community. There has rarely been a more important time for us to be writers and musicians. Our discouragement at watching this country move backwards into what many in the past few days have called that horrific term “Melting Pot” instead of forward into a multi-cultural society must be met by our abilities to give voice to our frustration.
It has always been the task of the artist to expose inequity, injustice, and fascist tendencies. It was Thomas Paine whose small seditious book Common Sense instilled in the citizens of the colonies the ability to move forward; it was David Walker who called upon his Black brethren to resist; it was Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience; it was Ida Tarbell and Carl Sandburg. It was the writings of John Stuart Mill, and Richard Wright. It was the writings of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
It was, it is, the poets.
President John F Kennedy said, “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
Some have suggested that one voice doesn’t weigh much anymore in a world of a million sound bites. However, other than bad flash mobs, there has never been such a thing as a spontaneous chorus. The artist, despite their isolation, has it in their power to put voice to what others wish to say but cannot, but once they hear it said, sing along with the harmony of their generation. Ginsberg wrote, “Poetry is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” And Robert Frost said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong.”
I can’t swallow.
I can’t do most things that will benefit this country and prevent its further demise, but I can write. I can do that. This is an appeal, then, to the writers and poets and to the musicians and actors and painters to combine our talents with our grief, to blend our anxiety with our refrain, to risk exposing truth.
And what do we say, exactly?
In whatever way we can, with whatever genre we can, that we can do better than this. Simply, that we are better than this.
“We must always take sides. neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” –Elie Wiesel
I spent time tonight outside watching Saturn slide west, and the half-moon along with an abundance of stars visible along route 33 east on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. From my vantage just up the side of an embankment three miles from any town, stars filled the ordinarily black sky.
It gave me pause. Jupiter started to reveal itself just about the time the State Trooper showed up to take pictures of my car and the deer, but once he put out the flares and made sure I was okay before he left, I moved right back up that hill and found what is probably a nebulous, and other than talking to three or four kind people who stopped to make sure I was okay and to see if I needed a ride, I spent the night focused on the distant lights.
A deer hit me. I think we need to dispense with the ridiculous notion that we “hit” deer. Sometimes, perhaps, if we are distracted and a deer happens to be minding her own business in the middle of a road. But usually, and this time in particular, we are moving along fine when from the woods on the right a deer hit me, a beautiful tall, strong buck leaped to clear a small ravine between the road and the hill, and landed on the front of the passenger side of the car, crushing it entirely to the ground. I managed to stop on the shoulder but the deer went spinning through the air another twenty feet in front of me. He never twitched. Never looked back up. Dead on contact, both the deer and the Toyota.
But man, those stars. Just this morning on NPR I heard that a good friend of Galileo, Simon Marious, named the moons of Jupiter. I couldn’t see them with the naked eye, nor the rings of Saturn, but our own moon was perfectly visible. When the State Trooper lit the flares I thought I wouldn’t be able to see as well, but it was fine.
I was trying to remember some song from the seventies about the moon when a pick-up pulled up and a man got out. He asked if I needed help and if everything was okay. His license plate noted Disabled Vet so I asked and he had served two tours in Afghanistan. We walked up the road to the deer, still in perfect shape except for being dead, and the vet asked what I was going to do with it.
I’ll be honest. It never crossed my mind to do anything with it other than pull it off the road. I told him since the police already got pictures and filled out the police report for the insurance, he was welcome to the buck. I helped him load it on the bed of his truck and he was so pleased. “This is a ton of fresh meat” he told me. I wished him a Happy Veterans Day and thanked him for his service, and he drove off. I climbed back up the hill to wait for the tow truck. Almost two hours later he arrived. It was a flatbed since my engine is more or less crumbled beneath the new accordion style hood. I climbed in his cab and after he hauled my car onto the truck, we drove off. The car now sits in a field in the front of my property since he was able to make it around the first bend of the driveway.
I’ll deal with the car tomorrow.
Tonight my mind is on stardust and the million tons of meteor dust that fall every day, some of it fell tonight while I waited, almost bridging the distance between me and the cosmos, uniting us, like a deer and the hood of my car but with more grace.
I can have an anxiety problem on occasion. It hit tonight and it might take a few days to subside, but it will dissipate faster because of the stars, and the sky, and the way it never minded what went on. I kept thinking of my mother who in so many videos I’ve made of her, says, “It is what it is.” Trudat Joanie. Damn straight. I actually thought “It is what it is” as I climbed back up the small embankment and watched the sky, fixed on some bright star not far from Ursa Minor. Maybe Vega.
I have been in need of slowing down, of taking my time, being more present. I have been on the go for far too long cruising in the left lane, and lately I’ve been thinking about that, about walking the Camino in the summer of ’26, about just slowing down in everything I do. Then a deer hit me.
The tow truck driver was like Obi Wan, the way he talked with such exactness, with a kind tone. He said he was glad I was okay, and he put his hand on my shoulder when he saw the car and said, “Brother you are not having a great night, but I’m glad we’re here and talking about it.”
Way to slide the worst of this night immediately behind me.
We drove home and he slid the car off the truck bed onto the grass in the field on the front of the property, where it sits right now in the cold instead of down here near the house under the porch lights, warm and comfortable.
After I emptied it of most of the stuff inside, I stood in the field and looked at it, thinking about the myriad trips to western New York and Maryland, to Florida so many times, and to all the state parks my son and I have hiked in the past five years or so, and I sighed, looked up, and found Vega again, lighting my way, walking me back from the car to the house. Before I went inside I heard something in the woods. Deer bed down around here all the time, and when I heard several I knew that’s what was out there behind the shed. More likely a fox, but that just ruins this story, so I’m going with the deer.
I wanted to apologize. I mean, I can replace the car. But that poor deer is now on his way to some Vets freezer.
The sun came up today; I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. People out on the highway going to work, rubbing their eyes. The morning flock came calling as kids ran off to school. Autumn leaves kept falling, following nature’s rule.
It seems I forgot. This happens to me a lot.
I need to head back to Boston; I need to be northbound. Feel the chill sweep down from the Berkshires and stop at the cider mill in town. Climb to the summit of Wachusett to watch kettles of hawks fly by; maybe drive up to Ringe, New Hampshire, to the Cathedral in the Pines.
I need to find that peace again. I’m tired of waking up in pieces.
I’ve been to the side of a canyon on New York’s Southern Tier and imagined it some foreign land then swam in the river, ate sundried fish, laughed at the infinite possibilities, threw caution to the wind. I once walked fifteen miles in the heat of the Sonoran Desert after my car broke down—no cell phone, few truckers with CB radios, just walking and dust, and I’d do it again, that silence, the distant hills of Mexico. Drove on over to New Orleans one January in some cold snap, drank wine watching a Dixie Jazz Band on Bourbon Street.
How can I forget that day? Why did I forget that day?
I woke up this morning at four am and grabbed my phone and read the news, turned over, went to sleep. Woke up a few hours later and headed to the bay, bothered by the reality of what comes next, until a gull flew by, and the bay like glass could pass for a blue mirror, sat like it did for watermen for centuries, like it has for those of us who dreamed of sailing away, like I dreamed of doing after reading Robin Lee Graham’s account of his five year journey around the world in the sixties during a decade of war and turmoil, and found peace, and the Great South Bay back then looked just like this today, just this morning after the news and the shock of it all.
No one’s going to slow me down.
“No one’s going to know I’m gone.”
After the last one I went to Florida and watched a manatee make his way north along the gulf shore and I was in the moment, alive, then, as life should be, as it always should be. Like the time a deer walked up to me in the woods of the Southern Tier and ate some bread I had in my hand, nibbled my palm, pushed her head against my chest, while my friend the late Fr Dan watched from a porch, like he sent her himself to come call me in for breakfast. That’s being alive. That’s me aware and present.
I need to ride again that ferry to Nantucket, pull my sweater around my neck, my face damp of saltwater, my heart solidly present and strong. It’s just up there, due north and to the right. Right now.
Life has not paused, will not pause, will not disappoint, cannot be compromised or negotiated with. Not my life anyway. Not for a speck of an insignificant bad decision. Not for this moment nor any implications for the next term. I can be too present to be distracted by yesterday’s or tomorrow’s false suggestions.
Venus is in the western sky before dusk tonight, bright right above the sliver of a moon. And just past there is some kid from the Island who once wanted to travel in space, who settled for Plan B, who measured the reach from Brooklyn to eventual nothingness and discovered there’s too much distance still to cover to not recover from some passing disappointment, some temporal distraction.
“Show don’t tell” said my writer friend Tim in Texas. He was talking about the narrative, but so am I when I thought and then said aloud to myself, “Show, don’t tell,” and thought again about the Netherlands and Connemara, about Boston, about the peace I know on Merton’s Southern Tier and the presence I know here at Aerie.
Yeah, the sun came up today; I shouldn’t be surprised. No one rewrites what I write. No one gets to decide where this narrative is going but me. Not today.
This is Part Five of a Five Part Series here at A View.
The five stages of grief as outlined in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ On Death and Dying are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
To wit:
Denial: A natural reaction to loss, denial can help people slow down the grieving process and avoid feeling overwhelmed. It can also be a way to try to understand what’s happening.
Anger: A common reaction to the frustration of no longer being able to live in denial, anger can feel like an emotional outlet as people adjust to a new reality. It can also provide temporary structure and a connection to the person who died.
Bargaining: People may try to change the circumstances that are causing their grief, such as hoping that things will improve if they take certain actions.
Depression: A stage of grief
Acceptance: A stage of grief where people find control and figure out how to proceed
PART FIVE:
Acceptance:
The truth is I accepted some deaths nearly immediately. Letty is the best example. We saw it coming eighteen months out and we talked about it often, particularly her take on the post-life expectations. She told me to look for the birds feeding on the porch and she’d be among them. She told me she’s just going to close the door behind her. So by the time July rolled around and she slipped away, acceptance of that new reality was already on the table.
Dave was more difficult having not told a soul about his impending death due to cancer. Richard was a shock but his self-isolation from society for several years prior to falling and dying made his death closer to acceptance than any sort of anger or denial.
They’re all different, and Ms. Ross is clear that the stages weave in and out of our consciousness, rising then receding, and just when acceptance seems at hand, depression might pop back on the scene.
The thing is acceptance is about knowing someone you love is gone and finally learning to accept that your new reality is one without them and learning to live that way. The less involved someone has been in your life, the easier acceptance becomes. Dave and Letty and Fr Dan and Dad maintained an absolute presence in my life, so accepting their absence, particularly since with the exception of my father, the rest all checked out at nearly the same time, has been more difficult. Accepting is a sense of no longer being lost when a particular time of the day might have been occupied by conversation or even texting, a long walk to the Farmer’s Market or a slow walk around the mall. The instinct might remain to wish you could do that again, or at the very least to slip into a funk because you can’t do that again. But acceptance is being able to remember those times, smile, appreciate how lucky you were to have at least had them, and continue.
Caution: Just when that happens, depression might snap back. Just saying. These stages are circular.
In any case, when my father died nine years ago, acceptance was easy because of the conditions of those last few years, but to this day I have trouble sometimes understanding that loss of security, even at my age. There’s something about the loss of your father that says, “You’re on your own, Pal,” even if I was an AARP member when it happened.
What I have found interesting is the larger picture here that I’m trying to frame for myself. Accepting the deaths of the primary people in my life from all stages of my life—Eddie from childhood, Dave and Bobbie and Debbie from high school, Joe and Cole and Dave from college, Richard from a time I was learning to live on my own, and through those years and the rest of my years until recently, Dad, Letty, and Fr. Dan, has caused an unexpected twist: the acceptance of my own death. While it has not become something I welcome, it has become something I don’t worry about, as if everyone else on my team went on ahead and is waiting, but that’s not right either.
Maybe it is just that I accept that the world keeps turning without them, and so must I, maybe even by living more, experiencing more, particularly for those who left too soon. Acceptance for me—and this isn’t for everyone—means that death is more a motivator, like a new teammate; we’re working together here, this unusual macabre mentor whispering in my ear through the absence of my friends and family, “Keep going,” or as Virgil noted, Death “twitches my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming,’”
Acceptance comes quickly when you hope for someone to no longer suffer, but it soon evaporates and is replaced by those other stages, like soccer players on a pitch replacing each other, taking a break so that the entire Grief Team remains strong. Eventually acceptance will return and dominate until it is our turn to put others through those same stages with our own departure, closing that door behind us.
For me there has been one exception, and those who knew Fr. Dan, and more specifically had a relationship with him like I did, as many have had, my “acceptance” of Fr. Dan’s death was nearly immediate. Of course the suddenness of his death, particularly only a day after we talked and hours before we planned to talk again, allowed Denial to dominate, but with Dan it is different. It has to do with his spiritual presence in all he did, his nearly reincarnation of the life of St. Francis and how Dan discussed saints and holiness as if they were brothers and sisters and he was already in and out of the otherworld, and more often than not it felt like he was heavenly from the start and took some time to visit us on occasion. This is difficult to explain, but he was not of this world anyway, so his departure from it seemed right. Letty wanted to stay, as did Dave and all the others. But Fr. always struck me as someone who couldn’t wait to die despite his absolute love of life and nature and all that exists, not in any depressive, suicidal way, but as if he knew something we didn’t, and we’d just have to see for ourselves.
People over the last six months have not missed the chance to remind me “you don’t get over one’s death or grief, but you learn to live with it, live differently.” Yeah, I know, and I do appreciate the sentiment and concern, but while acceptance is the ultimate goal, denial remains my favorite.
The Yankees lost the World Series
(how’s that for a non-sequitur—hang in there)
and while I’m not a fan having pulled for the Mets during the playoffs, once the Mets were out of it, as a native New Yorker I had to pull for the Boys from the Bronx. I know many Yankee fans, including close friends and a handful of misguided cousins, and I could observe the five stages of grief play out over the course of the last twenty-four hours. Denial, of course, that they could make it that far and lose so swiftly, despite the game they kept for themselves. Anger, of course; I mean they left the bases loaded with one out! Come on! That lead to bargaining of what could have been done differently, followed by the harsh reality you could see on the players faces after the Dodgers won, and, of course like all players of all games, eventual acceptance that this one got away but wait until next year. Having been a Bills fan for decades I’m well used to the routine.
So Liz’s efforts to label the stages of grief allow us to stretch beyond just death and find them applicable to many situations. But at the end of it all is death, which for the rest of us is the beginning of life without someone we loved and still love.
When I go for a walk I think of these people, and sometimes simply by having a wandering mind I end up in some pseudo conversation with them, talking to Letty about the floods in Spain, talking to Dad about his putting, talking to Fr. Dan about how hard it is sometimes to keep going.
And in my head he tilts his head back and smiles that wide smile, lets out a small laugh, and says, “I know Bobby, I know. It’s exciting, isn’t it? To not always know what happens next?”
In these days now when this happens, he walks away just then and I watch him move into my neighbor’s cornfield like James Earl Jones, and I turn to see Letty staring at me, saying, “He’s right Bawb. You need to keep going. Just ask him,” and she points behind me where I see Richard bouncing from foot to foot, saying, “She’s right Bob! Move your tooshie!”
and that thought makes me laugh out loud, until depression settles back in, and just as EKR warns, it gets heavier and heavier, and heavier, until I put it down and spin back into denial, wondering what everyone is up to that day, out doing their own thing in the world.
But I know better.
You’re the color of the sky Reflected in each store-front window pane You’re the whispering and the sighing of my tires in the rain
You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost In everything I do Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue That’s the way love is
a view from this wilderness 