about my French husband’s thwarting of our Midwestern Thanksgiving plans, and how this time last year I broke one phone and at the same time a CA misdemeanor. But then I read Nayla’s post.
It’s so hard to do something to honor the those who are not here, because you never really know what someone else would want. Years and years ago, my mother picked out hymns, flower arrangements, New Testament passages - but that’s my mother. Other things I’ve come across this year…Jane Kenyon has some wonderful and beautiful works, such as this, and my God, especially this, a poem one of my father’s friends sent me just two weeks ago, one so deeply personal and relevant, I might be able to say more about it in thirteen years or so. But therein sort of lies the difficulty, it’s almost impossible to find something appropriate. Finally, I wanted to post Leonardo Alishan’s The Black City, but the text is no longer on the internet; (and maybe that’s a good thing- I think it’s a beautiful and hopeful poem, but nobody else has ever agreed). So Nayla, I could not think of the right thing to say, and I have to tell you- I’ve been reading a lot of this sort of thing lately. It’s difficult to find the right balance of sadness and beauty- and to know what honors a person’s memory. And then I remembered something I read last night in a writing workshop, something with airplane travel and crankiness and curly brown hair, and it has been on my mind ever since, that and your initial post, about dying and being alone, and what I want to say to you is that what I read last night was about a family that was the opposite of alone. They were separated in some ways, but they were not alone. And I bet there is room for friends. It was about many other things too, but this is the thing that stands out today. I can imagine how difficult it was yesterday to read and reread and then post that work for Week 2 on the same day such sad news came, but I think that it’s sort of a gift to them that you wrote it, and maybe in ways less easy to define, a gift to you too.
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I don't know what I would do without the internet. when I moved here, I ran around in a frenzy of church-shopping and yoga and writing groups and zumba, all to connect with real live people. None of that has really paid off. I am not surprised. These are long-term investments. But sometimes I think about the fact that there is no one I can see face to face who really understands me, apart from my husband and my mother, and they are going through their own life stressors, and it makes me sad. And then I come home to my computer and see Erin's posts and emails, and I feel like her friendship is a present just for me and the internet is the wrapping paper, black and brown and spotted with butterflies.
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