Category: Love and Loss

The things which strike me and my family, day by day, as we deal with life without a husband and father whose life was cut short by pancreatic cancer.

Rabatment and Ruins

Plum Island, Newbury, Massachusetts

It’s all about the balance.

I’d neither learned the techniques people use to frame shots with a “real” camera, nor ever heard of rabatment until now. It is but one way to capture a slice of the world with rectangles-within-rectangles.

Consider all the lines one could draw to carve up the whole of a Plum Beach sunrise space into geometric planes. The cornflower sky becomes slatted air, as if one could reach up and gather sunrise’s starbursts into a morning monture.

Above, left to right: Salisbury bridge, Massachusetts; suspension bridge in Bowdoin, Maine; planes of wood and air in Salisbury, Massachusetts. below: Artichoke Reservoir in West Newbury, Massachusetts.

Light and air carve off rectangular planes from landscapes of still water and gusting sky.

The above photo was taken on an extraordinary sub-zero Massachusetts morning. It somehow packs in each separate category of cleaving and balance in a landscape: rabatment on the left, where a leafless island tree anchors the composition; sky sheared off at the lower third, where the Merrimack River flows East to the horizon and the Atlantic; and a trick of light and clouds that slices straight down the mid-seam.

And I could not possibly leave the subject of rectangular composition without sharing a bit of rabbatement–tricks of composition by means of color and light and segmented negative space in and around another Rabat. . . .

This Father’s Day, in the After….

Father’s Day is complicated.

It will never cease to amaze me that this picture of my beaming husband, with his ever-present off-duty camera, was taken just ten weeks before he died. And that his (physician’s) heart knew it. His smile remained true while mine, at very best, merely quivered on the edge of despair.

I can only now see that I was literally incapable of facing straight ahead as he did.

That year, Father’s Day fell ten weeks after his death. For the first years I couldn’t even face special occasion greeting card displays in the drugstores which commanded my frequent trips as various injuries and ailments visited our household.

The next Father’s Day began in Belfast. In the day’s drenching early morning hours, I came close to creating an international incident while bringing his ashes to Northern Ireland. Four years later, on Father’s Day, my own father died. Ten Junes later, we gathered for his father‘s burial.

As I said, it’s a complicated Sunday.

Father’s Day overlooking New Hampshire’s White Mountains, from the Castle in the Clouds

As our children have gone off to school and dispersed, I’ve often spent the day alone, always outside, as he would have liked to be. We’ll do that today, too, whether the sky stays clear or not.

I’ll continue mourning the absence of his guidance and wisdom and kindness, most of all for our children but also for the endless friends and patients and strangers his presence on the planet would have continued to make better in the decades he should have had with us.

I’ll ache for the absence of the look he’d have had as he photographed a full solar eclipse and a blazing aurora he could have seen just outside our old yellow house in New England.

I’ll feel sorry for myself, for the absence of the unpierced heart and unvanquished hope I once had.

And I’ll be thankful because I still hear and see and feel him in every full and empty and in-between space.

Newburyport MA (c)S.M. Glennon

Gardens of Sound

I hear music everywhere, especially in the quietest places.

In the then-present of this photo from Ireland, three of my children and I looked out from darkness to the vivid light of day beyond the window. I didn’t consciously hear music at the time, but I hear the soundtrack when I look at the picture.

The trip was in honor of their father, on the second Father’s Day without him here with us in the traditional way. In the picture, I hear music. I travel back in time to Phillips Church and hear the Rev singing the words to Thaxted, from Jupiter in Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite.

All of that afternoon’s music floods back. It comforts me. The sibilance of Sweet Baby James sung by hundreds. Becca’s For Good.

Lilting notes and words of light and love and fellowship floating above an empty black plane nothing escapes.

I wish everyone could hear it.

Photos somehow press “play” and I hear songs my daughter sang and music she and her siblings played. Papa Dick singing a customized song for each of fifteen grandchildren he bounced on his knee on countless Sundays. I listen to tuneful and argumentative birds I watched years ago. Satiated crowds chattering around a mirrored sculpture in Salem just after Thanksgiving. Blue Angels roaring overhead. A John Philip Sousa sound track to July fireworks, and I cycle back to countless marching band and Percussion Ensemble performances and practices. Beloved beagles synchronously snoring and baying. The sounds of silence at sunrise.

And this one? I hear Fenway Park. Birds singing to each other along the Emerald Necklace. “Put me in, coach.” The Standells’ Love that Dirty Water. Dropkick Murphys shipping up to Boston.

Please, Come to Boston. If only for the springtime.

Ears to the heavens, let me hear you again.