grief – Love in the Spaces

‘Til Death…and After

*Not even a bird could be heard in pre-dawn mist*

The quiet hours can be overwhelming. When one finds the way outdoors, at times when no other human guests are likely to be encountered, there is no shortage of wonders to be found in such silent vistas. Nor is there any way around confronting the unadorned absences of those who should be here with us.

There’s nothing quite like watching the sun emerge above a sea of clouds, or disappear underneath the horizon at sundown, to underscore the thin and immeasurable wordless space between heaven and earth.

I’ve been alone to see such moments–before dawn and after dusk–in some of the planet’s most densely-populated cities, and some of its emptiest places.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to regularly appear on these pages. I’m still not able to explain what’s caused me to be-for far longer than I could have imagined-uncharacteristically hushed about major portions of my last several years.

But such enforced silenced swaths have left me enough space to share my very present past, packed today with the quiet hours in which I still celebrate the July marriage that brought me everywhere I’ve been since leaving home for school. Not only to the earthbound places my husband and I were lucky enough to share, but all the places to which his loss indirectly has brought me.

*New life among ancient ruins, Volubilis, Morrocco*

On each such anniversary, I’m astounded anew that he hasn’t aged alongside me. It stunned me when, during one of these quiet hours, I first realized I’d not only caught up with, but already somehow lived beyond the age he’d reached at his death. It was more crushing when I realized one of our children had lived more than half a young lifetime without him.

But in quiet hours at timeless vistas and ancient places, I can sometimes spare my aggrieved self the focus on earthly years. I allow myself to see the enduring forever.

Even when the colors fizzle, or are overwhelmed by fog, there are treasures in the near-silent spaces of the endless quiet hours.

Happy Anniversary.

The Long Way Through…

I’m so conditioned to my lens of somber reflection that if I see the word “zigzag,” a snippet of a poem about grief pops into my mind: “you went zig and I went zag….”

Never to share the same geometric or worldly plane again.

Zigzagging as a complete rupture–permanent separation from a single once-common point and place in the world. No longer a connection at the root, but instead an ever-widening impenetrable vortex away from it.

The wedge of the tornado, not its swirling touchdown point.

Charles Causley’s poetry-fueled rambles around his home town of Launceston included the hardest of hard-edged zigzags set into quarry stone.

But when searching my own images for zigzags, I find they’re not always sharp-edged, and rarely are set in stone.

Early sunset clouds cast a beautiful Icelandic pony in a otherworldly soft ice-gold that makes her appear to glow. A Cedar waxwing’s bright feathers set off soft black triangles and by perching on bare March branches divides the sky into floating triangles of pure blue. Sunrise pauses just long enough to separate itself into a sharply angled fan of fire that reduces a lighthouse to a tiny point. Sunlit leaves reveal a tree’s branching zigs and zags, which may rearrange themselves with as little as the weight of a squirrel.

Zigzags aren’t only sharp edges and set or severed stone.

Not nearly.

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.

Past Contrasts

Each snippet of the past is shaped by contrast. Then and now. Before and during and after. The light that was and the light we now see. The place where we stood, the air we breathed, the living and the dead.

When I took the above photo, I was struck by the near-perfect parallel positions of an eternal rock and a juvenile Plover (who may have been preening or its opposite, hiding from relatively giant petite me). They shared cream undersides and identically angled topcoats of variegated rust and oak.

A single sentient being and an eternally evolving rocky shore, perfectly positioned together in the millisecond I captured them.

And each photo I take represents another contrast: I am both outside and in my own head, here today and somewhere in the past.

In a single image you may find opaque and transparant, solid and liquid, shallow and deep. Man-made and nature-born. Straight lines turned to wavering reflections. Black and unbound color. Earth and fire and water and sky. Day and night.