I Drowned in Those Twin Rivers
He was awash in the light of a new moon when I lost him, just as I first remember him in the overarching recollection of my memory. The death rattle that took his voice from him echoed through the room, shaking me to my core. The terrifying noise combined with the darkness around his death bed to take hold of me, to make me feel as if I was but a small child in a dark room yet again.
His imposing passing was an undefeatable facet of existence, something I felt weak and frail against. This great cancer was the universe, and I but a man. The great irony of his death, the dyad of his existence in my psyche, the aspect of my relationship with him that I find both beauty and horror in, is that the first and last memories of my Poppie take place in the same room.
More so, looming above his frail body is the remnants of a lost age, artifacts of a time in which the greatest worries in the world were the fears of a child. Lying above him, was the moon he had so long ago put to comfort me. Now it only lay above where he would enter his final rest.
The light had long left my moon, and the stars had in the intervening years slowly fallen from the ceiling to the ground we humans walk that lie below. Yet the moon had remained, standing strong against the time that slowly broke down all material things in this vast world.
It remained as a testament not only to the beginning of me as I now know myself, but to the complex and loving relationship, I possessed with my Poppie. Yet in the wake of this death, it gained its final moniker. In my emotionally fractured psyche, it now served as a reminder of the way in which he was cruelly taken from me.
If light still remained in that long-lived moon, now it would serve only to illuminate the tears streaming down the faces of both I and the man who had stood so strong throughout my life. He was a man of purpose, walking through life so fast that one could hardly keep up. Yet now he seemed to be in a standstill, unable to do anything but accept that which he’d been given.
One of those great tragedies of life is the lack of words that night. No verbal love but that which was given to him. His lustrous, wavy hair was long gone, as well as the goatee that so defined his image. In their absence, all that served to replace their image were the deep-set lines that coincide with long life.
He was a happy man, jovial throughout both trivialities and trials of life. But now it felt like he was nothing of himself, a stranger. I missed him before I truly lost him, trapped in the inescapable reality of how death sets in long before it makes its final mark. The only expression of feeling he demonstrated in that final image I had of him was the tears.
Those jagged tears flowed right to my most inner self, carving me up in ways indescribable. My heart and soul were the world accelerated through millennia, with the strength of this water carving into me great canyons that might imprint upon my personality for time eternal. That sadness never truly leaves once it sets in. We just pretend it does.
I think us humans only pretend to know what to do in the face of death. We model ourselves after what we think we might do, follow the guidelines and routines set by mourner’s over immeasurable time. But we are all lost, in our own way.
Truly, what is there to say about how we feel about death and loss that has not been said. It’s horrific, yet there is no escape. It is impossible at times to differentiate between the many shades of the existential slice of our human psyche that is pain. I was a mix of near everything we conscious beings might encounter following his death, a complex number of feelings that I might never define.
And I had no remorse. Forgive me, if I might rage against the depths of my own depressive depravity. I was not myself, and at times I wonder if I have ever been myself since I lost him. Or at least the version that existed before.
I was already deep into my most personal work in the immediate wake of his death, something one might call an obituary of one word: sinking. I was drowning, both by choice and involuntarily. I saw that water ahead of me, and yet I dove in, nonetheless.
I was prepared to break my bones against the waves, struggle in vain to escape the sea that swallowed me so. Yet in the end, I rose to the surface. As I sank into those depths of despair, I persevered. I stood strong and walked away from that great sea of sorrow. I have never understood how I got back up, and yet who truly does.
We humans pick ourselves up all the same. All I knew was that my life moved on, and I thought I did as well. But a piece of me stayed lost on that ocean floor. A part of me that I have not ventured to recapture since those days of drowning, not until now by recontextualizing the beginning and end of shared experience.
Maybe in the depths of my soul, what I most seek is a better understanding my relationship with the sickness that took him from me. How can I ever hope to make peace with someone so close to my heart, if I cannot face the demon that looms ever-present in the form of the cancer that struck him down.
This disease always threatens to invade my very memories of him, tainting everything I still have of my grandfather, as if his life was not enough. It is always incomprehensible the idea that those we love might be lost in what amounts to an instant. Despite his battle being beyond a year in length, he disappeared from my life as if from a gunshot or instantaneous accident.
A year can feel as fleeting as seconds, time’s true testament to its hold on our perception of life. It can be as if a physical manifestation of Joseph Stalin’s harsh words on death, the idea that “one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.” Morph the meaning of this phrase and apply only its bare bones to the timeline, and we might better understand how long periods of time can feel as if they fly by, but a day can feel as if an eternity.
Why did he live and die together, morphed into one in my own fractured mind. Why do these two separate memories serve now to represent the greater whole of a human being, at least in my recollection. That which is not smothered under the shadow of that great sickness is cast under the light of a lost moon, threatening to remember him in only in death even in life.
That damn moonlight, why does it still wash over me. Why is there no escape, no matter the years that I put between. The sun is but respite, as night comes all the same. My own galaxy is now my own nightmare, with the celestial bodies revolving around the moon of his passing. I want to understand something that is without understanding.
How can I ever hope for an answer to what his life and death mean, when death itself is the great unknown of life. How can I ever hope to forge a new beginning without knowing where I come from, truly.
