On Grief

 

I can’t remember ever being able to smell daffodils all over the yard, but they are stinking up the place this year, blowing yellow trumpets along every wall and border. The best they’ve ever been, I’m sure. They didn’t get frozen hard after they went to bud, for once; didn’t have to lie down in translucent submission to winter’s slap.

 It’s two years tomorrow since you died, March 25, 2019, and I feel as if it’s me with six feet of 

sandy loam between me and the grass and sky. Why is that? Why at the two year mark? Has anyone studied this? Today, I am impervious to joy. I see it all around me but I can’t feel it, I can’t make it up through grief’s deep clay. Look, everything tried to lift me up, but it barely worked. I cried at lunch, I cried at dinner, even though I took nice food out onto the patio I had built for myself. I fed a lot of it to Curtis. At lunch I looked straight up, bawling, at a creamy white cloud and there were three hawks circling silently—a pair of redshoulders being escorted off to the west by a very large, very white- bellied, broad-breasted redtail.

 At this point I know her just by her tanklike shape, but I look, I must make sure; I wait for her to turn and yes! There is the light hitting off the rumpled white feathers on her torn and mended right patagium, the one she ripped on barbed wire before I found her hanging there on October 25, 2019. How is it that I get to see her again? And how is it that seeing her just makes me cry more? Nature tries, I cry.

 

And Nature tried again—a raven circled high, high above, a wedge-tailed, still-winged marvel, letting out a rolling croak, just to the north of the tower atop our house, the one you dreamt, the one we had built, the one that was worth building just to know we could do that. Nobody but you thinks to build a tower on their house. And while I was watching the raven, the lisping tlit! of a tree swallow, first of the year, and my unbelieving eyes watched it cross the path of the raven. How is it that I got to see those two birds together? And this morning, the ringing wild song of the first Louisiana waterthrush came up out of Goss’ Fork, and only now do I remember when writing about it that right after we met you wrote me a song about how “the waterthrush so sweetly sighs,” rhyming that with “the warmth in her butternut eyes.”  It was the first song you wrote for me, and it was a fairly good one. Not many people get good songs written to them. I put that in my basket of pluses. Those two fine kids, too, the best music we made. 

  

 

All this happened today. At sunset I sat out on your little patio and a woodcock flittered back behind the great brushpile I’ve built—I know the sound of their wings. And then a big red bat came circling over and over around the back yard, the evening sun lighting its chestnut wings and setting its cinnabar hair afire. My favorite bat. Well, OK, there’s my favorite bat now, circling. It’s all piling up. The meadow woodcock started up calling and dancing, adding its twitter, hiccup and beep to the evening drag racers out on the county road, to the moron’s roar of engines and barking dogs in three directions. Clinging to the magic I could hear above the din, I decided to walk out the orchard in the moonlight to see if there were more woodcocks out there. No, but there were spring peepers in the wet field below, and I needed those. On my way back by your parents’ graves, a brown thrasher, the first of the year, scolded me with a dry skidding tuff! call, one I know by heart, knowing a little something about brown thrashers. Again, a first of the year, and my first ever heard in the dark. I thought then that this means it’s time to plant the peas, but the thought  brought no leap of excitement; it just made me tired. More tussling with my faint-hearted gas rototiller, with no one to even hear me cuss.

 

I sat on the stone bench and listened to the woodcock, then headed out the meadow in the bright moonlight, to the big black shadow of the lone pine that watches over your grave. I thought how odd it was that I could lose you quickly, so sadly, and now can only sit down by your bones. But at least there is something of you here. I feel lucky to have that much. Not many people get that.

 I thought I might tell you how it all was today, how it has been for me here alone, but found I had nothing to say that wasn’t covered by the moonlight. I looked at the perfect black blot of my head’s shadow on the still-bare clay of your grave, looked at the black spikes of liatris poking up, heard you in my head saying, “Prairie GAAAAYfeather!” and sort of quarter-smiled. I looked at the outline of our house against the sky, the only light a pale blue glow emanating from my little fishtank in the kitchen. I needed some other souls in the kitchen, so I bought three tiny guppies, who swim up and down and side to side in their miniature world, begging for flakes. 

 The guppies, my sweet dog,

 the sunset luau of that hibiscus,

 the daffodils, the patio…the endless brush cutting and clearing; even the 16 goldfinches twittering in their cages all over the house; the bats and woodcocks and thrashers and wrinkly dry peas counted out…they’re all hedges against sorrow, really, they’re what keeps me with the living, on this side of the clay. Today was hard. Tomorrow will be what it will be, I suppose, and my feet will go on, and my heart will have to go along with them.

To you, Will.