A fraternity of grief

A Cohea family Easter (shot by Dad), ca. 1967: Mom, Molly, me (goofy, seated), Will and Timm.

Last night Beth and I went next door to visit with Karen, recently widowed after her husband Robert died of esophageal cancer. She lives in Ft. Lauderdale but the two bought the house next door when they married and furnished it as their getaway from South Florida. (For some reason, they both thought of Mount Dora as “South Georgia.”)

The house has been empty for three months following Robert’s death. Karen just wasn’t sure she could come up here and be alone in the place where they were married and came to stay a weekend or week every month and dreamt of one day retiring in.

But credit her for courage and on a breezy, cloudy, warm late Monday afternoon, the three of us sat on her back deck getting caught up on the story. A box of Kleenex and a beer in front of her, Robert’s dogs Scoobie and Auggie panting on the deck nearby, she poured out details we heard previously heard in passing – of their trip to enter a whole-foods alternative program in Atlanta, of Robert’s fast decline as soon as they got there, of their deciding to come home from the hospital in Atlanta (where the final CAT scan showed the cancer everywhere in his body), the difficult trip home (dogs and cat in tow), getting him set up in their house on hospice and him dying just two days later as Karen lay their with them in their bed.

All the details of funeral and memorial, the outpour of love from friends and family, the blankness of shock amid it all – so difficult to believe he was gone -- so many things about it she just can’t remember, like her own sister (whom she is very close to) was at the funeral.

And now the utterly overwhelming depth of grief which she now feels, emerging from total shock into to absolute woundedness of it all.

It’s such a private pilgrimage, these plunges into the abyss of personal grief, something we on the periphery can only guess at, like watching someone mortally wounded go through throes of pain there is no physic for except time and the grace of God.

Anyway – Beth and I could only sit there and sigh, offer frail condolences, sharing bits and pieces of our own losses, from our fraternity of grief – Beth’s nephew James, my nephew Nick, Timm. Karen’s story brought my own grief over Timm again close to the surface (never very deep these days), thinking how no one got to say goodbye to Timm, and of four-day whirlwind visit of viewing, memorial, farewell, meeting so many people Timm loved whom I would never have otherwise met, trying to wrap up a life in that dingy bachelor’s apartment and all of the stuff which remained of Timm --- all of us in shock, unable to take any of it in …

And how can it compare to Karen’s grief for the love of her life, Timm the distant sibling whom I found out only afterward was so close in temperament to me? How can I equate my loss with my mother’s, losing her last child first? How does any of it equate and yet do, as if grief were a vicious, viscous tide of salt woe which is always there to rush into the vacancy which was once a living person? It was almost frightening to be witness to Karen’s grief – seven weeks old now with no let up, perhaps for years to come – and know how suddenly and completely such losses come. And we see it everywhere these days, co-workers and friends and family dying of heart attacks or cancer, suicide and car accidents, all of the mortalities which are the darkest companions of the living.

Frightening. We left Karen around 8 p.m. to come back home to a weary, migrained dinner (we’ll take Karen out for dinner tonight), leaving her to wander the rooms of that dream house alone. -- no one can save her from the terrible risk of loss every person invites when they say yes to love – while we yawned and ate our dinner watching episodes of “30 Rock” on DVD, the night getting breezier, promising rain at last, our cats all around us, our roof secure, bills paid, love intact, marriage safe for this night at least, which is everything, everything we can imagine …

Laying in bed before sleep (how precise, how precious to share that moment together), distant flashes of lightning in the window, Beth and I said our I Love Yous and began to drift off. I thought of how quickly we lost Timm, no time for farewells; I wonder if Karen was blessed in her loss, that she and Robert had many final months together. I think of Nicholas, Molly’s son, killed so suddenly on a rainy night in March 2007; or of James, Beth’s nephew, dead so suddenly on a bright January morning in 1999.

Gone so fast, so completely, leaving us to make our way, more alone now, infinitely more grateful for small things, the stuff which become the greatest poignancies in grief – Karen can’t shop at Publix yet because of all the small thoughts of what Robert would want on this or that aisle; she misses all of the small sounds of his dailiness in the house, audibles we are almost unconscious of in the routines of a life which become the silences of the most painful absence.

Anyway, I go on. It’s 4:47 a.m., the morning getting away, soon I have to be on with the daily grind; it’s cooler suddenly, a damp cool which breezes in with sounds of distant thunder. The garden was damp when I went out to feed Mama and Big Boy so I know it rained somewhere in the course of the night; a fertile, heavy feeling in the air, rich with jasmine bloom and something which is causing my nose to run like a faucet and sneeze – scuse me! A moment for distant presences to seem close, like a shadowy palm pressed up to the window, reaching, inviting, waving farewell, beckoning me to follow. Dark in the house next door, who knows how late Karen was up roaming around that empty house, calling her husband’s name.

They don’t go away, you know. The dead. They stay close to familiar places in our memories, even hallows of intimate spaces in a life, like this laptop which once belonged to Timm. The images are still here, and thus Timm is close by, his gaze, his smile, his incessant attempt to get it right and to live truest to the heart. The resonance, the vibrancy, the afterglow now is all.

A Tims family Easter 2009: daughters Sarah, Mary Beth and Cathy flank sister Molly.

Timm, the little one, was lousy at looking for Easter Eggs. May he find all of them now.