EVENSONG

19 April 2012             

Someone came to the studio earlier this week and said to me “hey, you haven’t been blogging much lately.” I told him it was hard to blog at the moment because I write from my own consciousness in order to discover what reality has to offer. But one’s own reality is so subjective and therefore often at odds with the realities of others and it is one thing to sit alone and write in order to experience the luxury of one’s own journey, but quite another to make these thoughts public when to do so could cause pain to others. Many a war has been started due to ill timing.

So, how does one speak of death in such a moment as this?

A friend is dying. He is Joel’s best friend for 45 years, and a brother to me for 22 years. For weeks we have watched him and his family struggle. For days we have been at the hospital watching every one do the best they can: our friend, his family, the hospital staff, us. Each of us with our own experience of reality, each of us like little boats bobbing on the outgoing tide, both straining at the moorings in order to set sail, and hugging the dock for the safety of the shore.

This morning, our friend’s wife calls to tell us he was moved to Intensive Care during the night. Thirty minutes later a dear friend in Paris calls to say that her husband died, suddenly, after breakfast. He is the other best friend of Joel’s, also for 45 years, and the other brother to me for 22. Joel always called him Brother Fish as the 2 of them spent many summers swimming side by side. 

We just spent a week with them in Paris last month, eating and strolling through that great city, laughing and crying together.

Poof.  Gone.

We fall to our knees, literally, sobbing. And yet within minutes are laughing at how it is just like D to go on a full stomach.

We look at these two men, at their lives, and at the nature of their dying. We try to equate things. We try to choose our own perfect death, as if one way might be better than another. Only to realize and accept that not only do we have no control over this but that all is as it is. Who are we to say there is a better way?

The birds are singing, somewhere outside the window. I search for them in vain. How, I wonder, is it possible to hear such mellifluous song on the 11th floor, surrounded by concrete, steel and brick, over the almost constant drone of air traffic? I listen to them and am transported to the bathtub in our old house on the Cape, where, on many an evening the two of us would soak, the window flung open, the last of the light filtering through the hydrangea tree, the birds full-throated.

If I could ululate, I would. Instead, I whisper in one man’s ear and light a candle for the other. 

Joel and I cling to each other, grateful to have shared yet another day together, as sorrowful as this one is. We talk in clichés, the richness of each a fresh truth:

Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today. 

Stay in the moment. 

Live each day fully. 

There are no do-overs. 

Act on your own behalf according to your needs and beliefs. 

Feel the sun on your face. 

Be grateful for the roof over your head. 

Take your sorrow to a park bench and sit before spring’s glory. 

Eat healthy food. 

Revel in chocolate. 

Make amends where you owe them. 

Harbor no grudges. 

Give a dollar to the beggar you judge unworthy. 

Forgive the person who cannot return your smile. 

Take a lesson from the birds that sing as fully in a concrete jungle as they do in a wooded glen.