The Ghosts of Loss

We are ghosts, we who grieve, and we dwell among the spirits.

I thought I heard your voice today. You were upbeat in your “How’s it going” way. But you weren’t here. Well, not exactly not “here”. You are always here, somehow, just to the side, but when I turn to look, to sense you, you’re not there. I hold you within me though I no longer have form.

That nighttime call. Could you feel it when she said you were gone? Were you floating near me but I couldn’t sense you? Did you also shatter? You must have. This known universe was torn. It cannot be mended. I cannot be mended for, as you, I am no longer here, except in the peripheral. We had plans. That gift I ordered for you came today and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with any of this.

How can this be? I’ll call you. But “No”. I’ll see you. But “No”. I’ll hug you, hold you. I’ll touch your hair, your face. “No! No! No!” This absence inhabits me. Friends think they see me but I’m not here. I’m also a ghost. No longer the embodiment of whoever I was. I am the loss of you.

This is not all I am. There is joy in our life. The joys and the beauty that we always have been blessed to see and know... I must embrace them for they are just as real as your loss is real. But I don’t know how to mingle them. It seems impossible that Joy and Sorrow dance together though they must. Why does the embrace of other joys feel like a betrayal of you? Of your value, your meaning, your life? Why? I know it is not a betrayal but I feel it so.

“We’ll be blown off”. The wind shreds his shout, inches from my ear. My hands are cold. I want this summit. But it’s always just one more step.

The ridge is narrower than we expected. On an edge of ice, he has the burden of attentiveness. His misstep will pull me off with no warning. Roped together, if I slip, he leaps down the opposite side to save us. It isn’t fair, his responsibility for us. Yet we willingly tied ourselves together and will share a common outcome. It’s like the crazy intricacy of a marriage. Two are better, stronger, than one, but it’s complicated.

On top I weep frozen tears.

We descend into a storm, and to another chapter, with a different summit, and other tears.

Imagine a triangle representing this mountain.

Here we won’t talk about the bucket named Louie that we pooped in. Or how much better that system was than in the third world where any place is a go. When you are melting a four foot kiddie sled of snow for water every day, it becomes meaningful that the snow you dig is not a lasagna layer of fresh snow and old poop.

We won’t talk about the stark black and whiteness of snow and rock, sub-zero cold, or the surge of sensory overload as we are air dropped instantly back to the valley, leaving behind the glaciers and the wind, among green trees, and blooming flowers, the aquamarines of water, and warmth.

Our little triangle mountain.

Instead, take your images of that wandering, that mountain, and let it ripple – it’s a reflection, and you are looking at it upside down. The wind stirs the puddle, and your eyes lower to the real thing.

The mountain of my undoing begins with “He didn’t make it”. The shredding heart scream, “Not my son, not him”. The denial is material, un-creating, a ravaging conflagration of stark black and whiteness, in a nonmaterial storm.

Attentiveness becomes less tangible. We are here, there is the obstacle, but who will provide balance on this edge? If only I could leap down the other side, to save him, in the darkness of this valley of layered waste.

I do not wish this on someone else. This is not a looked-for exchange, something I want someone else to bear in my place. Just not mine. But it is mine. I wonder how much fear you must experience in the Valley of the Shadow of Death before you can feel the sensual lushness of Comfort.

This ridge is narrower than expected. The winds are higher than predicted. My heart is cold. I do not want this summit.

A friend, trying to offer comfort said, “You can climb this mountain”. It’s not true. His words are not comforting regardless of the intent. “At least you had him for that long”, say others, “He’s in a better place”. I can’t blame them on the one hand. How do you speak to a ghost? It is an impossible task to stand in the presence of a disintegrated person, a person in the agony of the unbearable, who only looks like the person you once knew. I am an apparition to your substance. But still, I blame you for speaking the inane for your own comfort, for missing the mark, though I know you don’t know what to say. I do not know what to be. And the strength I once had must be rebuilt to carry this different weight, this displacement of all meaning.

An ethereal mountain is not a place to conquer somewhere beneath the world of the real. Or, what others may deem real. It is real, this world of us ghosts. We are the conquered, the ravished. Queued, as we are, as if there was somewhere to go or something to do. But there is no point to it. We are standing around in a place that resembles a world once familiar, but which has shifted, and the ghosts are shifted. We will never be fully men as before.

About the time you believe that there could be no more tears, they arrive again. Limitless. Undiminished. They ambush in a grocery aisle. Or burst surprisingly with volcanic force. Seep in near silence. Or contort with locomotive thrusts. Tears are a baptism. They wash, somehow, they wound, they scour. There are always more tears. I carry you within them, my lost one, for one more step.