The life you had, the beauty which lives on

More often now I approach the next post here at your memorial scratching my head and rummaging through folders, trying to find something new to say, something new to show of the life you had, the beauty that you captured.

The two are inseparable in the need to show your presence now almost three years since you died. I'm sure the former will keep dimming while the latter grows, beauty as the tungsten of the bulb of you which outlasts life itself, which takes on a life of its own.  Your particulars fade as you have, as we go on; but the essence you cared to cultivate and magnify becomes your life, the part of you we'll always see looking at your photos.

Again, the balance grows ever less even, your memory thinning and dimming, your works taking on more presence, perhaps because you fade. But today, if only for this post, I'll try to right that balance, offering at this memorial (a metaphor of grave you never fully occupied--not in one place, at least) an interplay of family pics and photos from your archives. They suggest nothing special and what's eerily spectacular about that, how from the particulars of any given life (with so much of it forever unknowable to all but its inhabitant) a garden, many gardens can richly grow.

And though your life was cut short so early - Lord knows what human highs and lows you would surely have loved and endured - the abundance that you left behind was not in the collective head-scratch of your loved ones who have tried to keep your memory alive. Rather that magnitude is in what all the images of you and your world  through your eyes suggest, a wonder-land of yearning and the bittersweetness, of particulars which heal - dewy fruit heavy on a on limb, the crepusular triumph of a mountain sunset, flowers opening wide their petals to drink the sunlight whole, rivers cascading in falls of stilled motion, people at work, kids at play.

That abundance suggest that beauty heals even what death stills - our capacity for aesthetic wonder, that sense of awe beholding God's plenitude where Pacific rollers crash and foam on rocky shores, end of one way of existence, launch into infinity beyond - that moment that you caught is the truest summa of your life. It's what remains-the beholding, the awe, the glory of God -- in a world meant to blossom a short while and then wilt and whisper into dust as winter ice descends. What remains knows that soon the warmth returns, and with it new growth, new possibility, new life, new beauty.  Winter always yields to the softest greens of spring.

The abundance never ceases: though we must, each in our turn, leaving behind our own arcs of woe and wonder, the small traces of the huge life we each loved. When I feed Mamacita outside in the morning, I know some day she won't show up. I pet her then as she eats, her fur so black, so smooth, her assent to my touch part of the communion we've shared for the past 8 years, wilderness and suburb coming together as a man pets a stray cat eating her fill, her tail lifting to greet my hand as I stroke down her back. That touch remains.

The softness. The greeting.

The welcome ...