Monday, May 27, 2013

Homage to the unknown??

I found myself walking through a cemetery this evening, faintly reminiscent of a time my Dad and I visited one some summer night when I was 12. I don't recall why we were there, perhaps to pay homage to someone or just to roam.  I do remember the eerie comfort of being in a place that recognized and somehow magnified that death was real or so it seemed as I stared at plot after plot.  I thought about death then as this realm that floated around us, almost tangible, like a constant tango.  I recall standing over my parent's bed staring them awake many nights as a child hoping they could assuage my angst about that moment when life ceases. They could not.  So, many nights I'd let it linger in the air after vivid dreams of a burning earth or dark alleyways in which Death itself or some "thing" seemed to accompany me. These days are no different.  I still dream of death and it still lingers in my waking life.  But it seems to hit harder when I'm going slow, in the polarity, in the juxtapositions. The tiger lily resting on an old wooden fence, the pruned up cheek of my elderly neighbor pressed against her 2 year old grandson's, the ripples from Geese skidding atop the Willamette, the first sight of the Pacific after many months away, the liftoff of a 747,  a smile from a homeless man who doesn't ask for a thing.  I see death in a stack of books yet to be read, I see it in light.  I see it in the planning of a camping trip to the coast.  I see death in all the things I won't be able to do.  I see it in the excitement of possibilities,  in all the places I will never visit and all the places I already have, in the two places I cannot be at once.  I see it in the sunset a friend sends me.  I see it in all the people I could love, if I'd let myself, and all the people I have.  I see it in the humor of the world. I see it when I send snail mail. I see it swaying in an empty hammock.  I see it in my chai tea steeping in a Christmas mug at a cafĂ© on SE 23rd.  I see it sometimes in a single word. I see it in a good one liner. Simply, it hits me when I'm exited about life.  And maybe this is when death isn't so eerie, it just is, coming closer and closer.  I wanted to snap a photo of the sun falling on the headstone reading the last name "Failing" but couldn't muster up sharing the irony via snapshots. So I walked on, past Florence, Wade, English, Deardorrf, Harlow and many others, some with flags in recognition of the holiday, one I've never found myself celebrating, either with fancy Americanized weekend trips or acknowledging anyone who served, sadly, but true.  Instead I wandered the headstones imagining friend's parents  and my own relatives who have passed, what they were like, what kind of jokes they would tell, whether they put cream or sugar in their coffee, if they drank coffee at all, if they had healthy sex lives, if they worried about money or the state of the world or what the reason for living was all about, what my great grandfather's quirks were, if he made similar silly faces, if we would have been close or even liked each other's company. I didn't kneel down and speak out loud above decaying bones or ashes, I didn't know anyone in that cemetery on Holgate.  I only knew that the sun was going down slowly behind gathering clouds and there was a crow near an old oak, picking at haphazardly tossed leftovers and an abandoned house next door, an orange and green coffee mug resting on stacked furniture, a hole in the window screen, and an Oregonian mailbox in tact, waiting, for the news.

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