My wife was notified over the weekend of the death of a friend of ours from Colorado.
He left for a hike on the mountain we used to greet each morning out our back door.
He went out for a hike and he never came back. Yeah, everybody’s got a fragile heart.
It reminds me of your lines from the aching “Livingston Suite” where your wife out
walking her dog discovered the drowned body of that boy. You wished it hadn’t been
her who finally found him. But it was. She said, “It had to be someone. Why not me?”
Why not indeed? The grand delusion that there’s some special dispensation to keep
us and loved ones from sorrow if we’ll be good and pray and avoid lustful thoughts.
It’s a tough one to shake for sure. In that same suite your buddy Kooser found a cinder
out on a long walk. A remnant of our bygone days, both long walks and cinders. But
you can find things when you walk. Our friend from Colorado found his last breaths.
Now there’s one more widow and three more fatherless children. Death’s a shit deal.
These days there’s an entire cottage industry around death, all this content to help us
embrace its coming, lessons to learn, steps to take so as to go gently, blah, blah, blah.
When Jesus’ buddy Lazarus died, the Lord snorted and stomped like a horse in battle.
Flannelgraph Jesus just getting a little weepy reeks of matching shoes and handbags.
My dad once told me a violent story about his father—Charles Alvin Blase, “Charlie.”
Charlie on a hardscrabble farm trying to stay alive and provide for a wife and two sons.
The porch dog they had kept having puppies, evidently puppies everywhere yelping
and carrying on, you could hardly walk without stepping on one. One day, no doubt a
day when the strain of living felt unbearable, Charlie’d had enough and took it out on
the dogs, went inside, grabbed a rifle, and walked out to shoot every last one of them.
My granny grabbed my wailing uncle and ran inside. My boy-father witnessed it all.
Now there’s your trauma, something akin to those grade school kids in Uvalde, Texas
hearing a plink plink and seeing it was the teeth of their classmates littering the floor.
Or your father and sister Judith, only nineteen, being killed by that drunken driver.
How does a human heart recover from something like that? How did my boy-father’s?
How he lived one of the most gentle men I’ve ever known still amazes me for he was
his father’s son, as am I. To believe such violence doesn’t run in our blood is foolish.
How about our friend’s wife and children in Colorado? How will their hearts recover?
Can they even? You were quite fond of that Rilke quote (you paraphrased it), the one
about “a point at which the exposed heart never recovers.” You were careful though to
always follow close with Goethe: “Such a price the Gods exact for song.” Such a price.