Unimaginable Life

Unimaginable Life

There is always room for the unimaginable.

As I am walking the shore of the tempestuous Atlantic this foggy morning, a howling wail comes crescendoing down over the dunes.

The wail is primitive, formidable, immobilizing.

A woman cries out in a strangled voice:

: “Where are you? “

Immediately followed by:

“Can’t you please help me?”

The questions seem harrowing and laced with intense privacy.

The intonation of her voice is chilling, and I immediately begin running away from the disembodied voice. To remain would be treacherous; it would be cutting things too close to the bone for me.

After walking a few blocks out of the gated beach area, my conscience kicks in- I am stunned at my actions: Did I really run away from a woman who may have been in some kind of danger? Did I reject helping a stranger? How could I leave her unattended?

I gather myself from my emotional stupor and run back to the beach,

As I reach the dunes, the fog has lifted, and I can see the wide expanse of the beach below and it is empty.

Starkly bare.

How can that be?

No one walked past me. There is no other set of footprints on the shore besides the one I left a few minutes ago.

. I head over to the bathrooms and yell out:” Hello! Is anyone here? Can I help you?”

But my questions are met with silence. The rest area is locked at this early morning hour.

There is no one here.

My conscience is clear; at least I tried.

As I continue my walk home, I abruptly trip and fall face first onto the pavement, splaying my arms and legs as I go down, biting my lip. As I get up, I look around to make sure no one has witnessed this graceless fall- of course no one has, no one is here.

I look down to see what it was I tripped over and discover I have tripped over nothing. The air itself is reason enough for me to fall these past few months.

I am wandering around in this half-sequestered state since David died. The man who took huge bites out of life has died and left me broken.

I am waiting for him to rescue me; to fill in the empty lodging that exists in my being since he passed away; instead, a clutch of black emotions clouds my days.

I follow the trajectory of a lone seagull as he flies overhead. He is heading for the harbor for breakfast.

He screeches out a piercing “ keow, keow” squawk as he dives headfirst into the bay.

The majesty of the bird itself reminds me of David reciting, verbatim” The Windhover” on one of our first dates over thirty years ago-his sonorous voice filled with passion and lust.

“My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”

David was more Hopkins than Hopkins himself, a poetic genius.

I am cognizant that everything reminds me of David lately: a blade of grass, a traffic light changing from red to green, a burnt piece of toast, beach towels flapping in the wind, opening the window by his empty recliner, index cards, eye drops, half-filled laundry baskets, boring refrigerator contents, a stamp for God’s sakes, sunglasses on the front seat of the car- ARRGHH….

Tthinking this, causes me to stop in my tracks.

David cannot rescue me from this. He really did die.

And with thumping clarity, sorrow enshrouds every particle of my being.

David is not going to be at the kitchen table reading The London Review of Books when I open the front door to our house.

He is not going to be there to shoot out his usual litany of questions about what I encountered on my morning walk.

He is not going to buoy me up with his love, his intellect or his compassion.

He is gone.

As I enter our home, I recall his words to me a few summers ago, as we sat dripping wet on our striped, Red Sox beach blanket, enjoying the warmth of the sun on our bare skin:

“Mavourneen, we are all going to die. This playing at life is going to end for each one of us. Eventually we are all going to be dragged off into darkness by the butcher called Death.”

This memory causes me to collapse into David’s recliner.

I feel faint, overcome with emotions.

What else did he say??

I close my eyes, and the image of his words come over in vibrant shades of purple hues:

“The mystical elements of life; the being unto death ness for Heidegger; the realization that, as Emerson says, the quotidian has to be imagined; makes every day” bigger than life.” …than lost life, …an unexamined life; than continuing to think that life will never end”

And how we hugged each other!

I remember this part vividly:

David holding me against his hairy chest as he whispered: “Mavourneen, this- us here right now on this beach, this is the realization of the nature of life, of NOW, of standing- out-from everydayness. This moment is one of choosing to live in the mystical actively.”

At this memory, I find myself succumbing to sleep- which has been elusive since David died- a minor weight has been lifted.

Waking up an hour later, I am disoriented, but less agitated,

I stagger over to the kitchen table. Reading the headline of the NYT’s is enough to make a maggot gag; our country is spiraling out of control.

How will I manage to get through this Sunday alone?

There has become a lucidness that was lacking before, of idealism in my love of, David.. Not poetic imprint. More a rationalist’s dye that has lifted for me the buried words that had emblazoned themselves on the escutcheon of my verbalized beliefs.

How do I thank him for the debt I owe him for the long brewing ruminations of our ongoing conversations? The beaten horse of our idealism ain’t near dead yet.

I owe him so much. For sending a ladder down the shaft of my feelings alone….and to that extent lost…and accepting the lostness as part of the restlessness that surrounds the human condition. He felt it all. And because of it, he not only sent the ladder down into the pit, but he also hoisted the ladder out.

And the celebrations! The delicious wrestlings with the thoughts and descriptions of a shared life.

I get up and grab an apple.

Munching on it, my mind returns to the memory of the voice of that woman on the beach. Her pleas sounded radioactive, rising out of a plume of fear.

The next morning, as the autumnal clouds go scurrying by, and I am walking bare foot on the shore I find myself scouring the dunes, searching the coves for a lone woman. And I am relieved that no one is about. That woman- whoever she was- must be fine.

Her pleas for help set off an internal engine of fear within me, making me feel that I had been dunked into a vat of calibrated terror. I am relieved that she is not here.

And the waves crashing on the shore remind me that nature is part of unleashed living; and despair lessens when confronted with the life renewals that nature offers.

And thinking that, I realize that I have lived my life as a chimera--searching out the presuppositions of our world, observing and critiquing all the ways the systems in life should work, and constantly, an exhaustive and ever- redefined analysis of the fallibility we human beings carry.

Who can I share this with now?

“David, where are you?” I beseech quietly to myself.

And upon asking that question, I hear that wail again!

The woman is back!

I look towards the dunes, where the sound came and I charge like mad up the hill to try to locate her. I must help her!

But no one is there!

I run to the other end of the beach, and from distance a few hundred yards, I spot her!

She is at the far end of Harbor Neck, and the wind is blowing about her, tossing her hair wildly about. She is kneeling in the sand, rocking back and forth on her knees, moaning.

I run down off the dunes, and as I get closer to her, my heart begins racing rapidly. She is sobbing and her words are muffled, incoherent. Something about her terrifies me. I stop abruptly and as I do, I fall again.

I take my time getting up.

I don’t want to help her.

Her agony feels cloyingly demanding.

God forgive me.

Once more, I scramble away, breathing shakily; off the beach, running back to our street, which encloses a small enclave of homes, nestled quaintly against the woods.

I feel like I am in a haunted movie; the woman is scary as hell to me.

I run past the split maple tree that seems to be calling out to me:

“I am here! Look at me!”

I stop to gaze at the tree, and strangely, I feel David is part of this tree.

He loved this tree.

It got struck by lightning last year.

I look intently at the wholeness of the tree.

It makes me weep.

God bless its life.

It shook out its entire heart for all of us.

Birds made their homes in this tree.

And they sang to all of us from its branches.

Its leaves were like honey wheat that tossed in the breeze.

It kept peace in our days and our nights.

And now it has been split in half.

I feel David urging me back, to the beach, to help the woman.

Reluctantly, I begin to run back.

Past the boardwalk and the closed restrooms.

Up over the dunes and onto the sand, running to catch up to the woman who is now running in the opposite direction.

“Wait! Please wait for me!” I yell at her.

But the woman doesn’t pay any attention to my words and keeps running away from me.

It takes me a while, but I am gaining on her.

She begins shouting:

“Stop chasing me! Leave me alone! Can’t you please just goddamn leave me alone?”

Her voice is familiar.

From the back, she looks a lot like someone I know.

But I cannot place her.

I have finally catch up to her.

I beg her:

“Please, stop running! I am here to help you. What can I do for you?”

My equilibrium is uprooted as she turns around.

The air instantly becomes charged with electricity.

As I reach out to touch her forearm, she evaporates into thin air.

The light absorption of reality assails me.

I am stricken.

The tracks of panic have caused this aberration.

The elocution of grief has caught me, and I collapse onto the beach, wracked by wretched sobbing.

The woman’s voice was my own!

Is my own!

I have been chasing myself.

The spinning grenade of grief has been unpinned.

I fall backwards onto the beach to absorb the entirety of the pain; I let the barricaded emotions out.

Tears cascade down my cheeks and into my clavicle.

“David, oh David, I love you. It has been one hundred eight six days since you left me here. I am not well. I am not okay. Don’t let me get crazy, too. I cannot bear being insane on top of all this pain.”

At the end of this pitiful plea, an entity of sorts passes over me: some radiant light; an orb of pure energy.

I sit up and I feel him next to me. I can hear him laughing at me:

“Really? A lunatic in our midst? No, no, my precious girl! I am with you on that platform of love we built. Look for me and I will be there. It is merely a matter of imagination. Choose possibility over predictability. Find the unimaginable in daily life, Mavourneen. That is where I will be.”

I am standing in an echo chamber of love.

The vanguard of annihilation dissipates.

The predator called death did not capture David.

David heard me! He did rescue me!

I stand to look at the glistening sunshine on the waves.

The defoliation of grief has begun.

I begin the walk home.

And as I am walking back, a butterfly alights itself on a rose bush.

The sun’s rays slant off the pier, where our red kayak rests.

I haven’t had the desire or the courage to use our kayak since he died.

No time like the present to conquer disturbances of the heart.

I follow the sun’s rays and with some effort, I turn the kayak over and water comes tumbling out, along with debris from inside the kayak. There are our two life jackets, hats, paddles, some rags, and a plastic first aid kit. I use the old rags to clear the kayak of spiderwebs and pure gooky things. As I am kneeling and cleaning the back of the kayak, I spy a small zip lock bag crammed deep in a corner.

My heart jumps.

For it is a classic David behavior: he always kept certain things inside the kayak to look over while he was out on the sea: books, journals, articles, letters.

With profound shaking, I open the bag.

Housed inside is a picture of me standing on the beach, looking at him, smiling broadly; the shadow of him, in the background as he is taking the picture.

Paperclipped to the picture is a musty folded up note.

Tears begin streaming down my face as I open up the note.

The words:

“The first night, our first date, we walked in silence to the memory of time. - to our first, our final, our eternal resting place: each other: HOME.

You picked me up- with all my pain and imperfections- and loved me.

And I held your heart and soul in the palm of my hand.

It has been twenty years since that first date, and I want to thank you for loving me. David, we will never be separated. Our love is in a land locked, time-locked universe named US, and nothing will keep us apart. I love you, sweet man. I love you,

Your Mavourneen”

The crucible of life comes crashing down on me.

Polished and shiny is this annunciation of love.

His last kayak ride was four months before he died.

I wasn’t with him on that trip.

But this note accompanied him on his last voyage.

I found David right now!

In this unimaginable moment!

And there is an ethereal awakening within me, knowing that he found solace in a note and a picture on his last voyage.

And he gave that solace back to me today.

No more agonizing: “Did he know how much I loved him?”

He knew.

He knows.

And I know how much he loves me.

And in the wake of this awareness, I find the inexplicable joy of knowing the flamethrower of love has rescued me.

I put on my blue life jacket, grab a paddle, climb inside the kayak and head out into the sea.

The solar oxide of love envelops me with each sea-soaked splash as I paddle out into Narragansett Bay. As light labors to mid-morning, it carries the invisible David with it.

And I think that when I get home, I will renew David’s subscription to The London Review of Books.

I will eat his last Klondike bar to honor him.

I will toast our love in a steamy bubble bath, reading Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And I will sleep with my favorite picture of him, along with his green plaid Irish cap- underneath my pillow.

The indecipherable language of love we shared is unimaginable and eternal.