Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Gifts and Messages

(August, 2002)

You wake up and look at her, still there. You watch her sleep. Her mouth is moving: she is talking to people. She wakes up and tries to look at the watch she is not wearing. She sees you and asks what time it is. You tell her and she asks if you are watching her sleep.

Is that okay?

Yes.

...

How soft and calm and beautiful her voice was. How gentle and warm she felt. How you lay beside her and placed your head on her arm and held her hand and she rubbed your face softly with her other hand.

How she felt the tears on her arm and saw that you were silently shaking.

You are emotional today.

I was just thinking about how much I love you.

That's nice.

Everything that is good about me is because of you.

You gave me a lot to work with.

Everything's going to be okay.

That's good.

...

Another gift: Sunday afternoon as she peacefully napped by herself. You went in and sat next to her. She woke up and reached for you.

Are you tired of sitting around?

No, I'm fine. I'm great, everything is okay.

Hold me tight.

She took your hand and put her other arm around your head. You lay without talking for a couple of hours. After a while you realized you were ready, beginning to sense (even hope?) that she might pass right there-quietly, content. But her breathing was still heavy and deep and her grip on your hand surprisingly strong. So you began to think: she might have some fight after all, plenty of life left inside.

And as you watched her you kept thinking: she is so tranquil, so silent, so beautiful.

...

More gifts. Time, not just all this time, but time itself. As fast as everything went last week (and this year, these past five years), it's been the opposite this week: everything has slowed down and you've all withdrawn from the world to exist (as long as necessary; as long as possible) inside this house, inside your love. She's at peace and not in pain, not entirely here and not entirely there; she's in transition and you're all following her lead. This transition has been calm and soothingly slow. Time itself is somehow outside of you and you're outside yourselves, on the inside.

...

Lying there again, in the near darkness, with no distractions (no words, sounds, TV, music, people) and just experiencing the ultimate kind of closeness. Putting your head on her shoulder and her putting her fingers in your open mouth as you breathe, just letting her find that place and rest them there, covering that hand with kisses, the softest reassurance you could offer. Having felt the most inexpressible anguish these last weeks this is the most redemptory sort of satisfaction; something approximating peace and almost, unbelievably, joy.

...

Try to remember. Never forget this: how calm she is as she sleeps, how oddly alive she seems, even as she is very obviously slipping slowly away. Asleep but speaking (to whom?), talking to people not in the room but clearly (hopefully) in her mind and especially in her heart.

...

Don't worry about anything, everything's going to be okay.

Okay.

Don't worry about Pop, I'll take care of him.

How...

I'm never going to leave him. I'm going to take care of him.

Take care of him.

...

In the end you try to do for them what they did for you.

You watch them, filled with concern and fear, hoping that love and care can be enough. You sit there, quiet, trying to radiate what you don't feel inside-trying to resist all the doubt and grief, the concern and fear. Please, you ask, just let her be peaceful; after all this, allow her to finally find peace. Looking right at her, all over her, you do what you can to provide some semblance of peace. By meditating, thinking, focusing (the type of concentration that eventually brings clarity), and trying to will everything to be okay (Everything's going to be okay: this is the one promise you've repeated these last two weeks; a message and a mantra). Three hours. Unloading an internal barrage of comforting, healing thoughts and images, offering up everything that's ever inspired you: snippets of songs ("While My Lady Sleeps" by Coltrane and "Blue Nile" by his wife Alice, and dozens of others), even fragments of poetry and prose (Ivan Illich: Death is over!; Emily Dickinson: Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; Keats: When I have fears that I may cease to be; Shelley: The lone and level sands stretch far away) and finally thinking, then silently humming the first nursery rhyme you can recall hearing: Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep. Then imagining it as a song, then hearing it (composing it?) as a jazz improvisation, with or without words, hearing a trumpet state the theme, then a sax, then the piano, then cymbals cascading in with a warm wash, until it takes off, soaring beyond music, beyond consciousness and somewhere else altogether...

Where were you?

Somewhere else. Out of body but in your mind? Shivering with purpose, glistening with energy and faith-faith in the energy inside, getting back to being inside this house, this situation, inside of yourself. Beginning to appreciate that you can't (shouldn't?) try to understand everything, especially the things you seek to understand most of all. Just fear and concern becoming concentration, concentrated energy ending up on the other side as love.