Life and Death (A Matter of)

Life was about to begin for me when on a TWA jet I poked tentatively at the soft walls of the tight round room of my mother’s womb.  And after quick-passing days she deu à luz (gave the light) to me.  Fifty years later life ended.  Books describe divorce as a kind of death, for its permanence and its depth of loss and grief, and perhaps more difficult even than death for in divorce there is no resting in peace for the dearly departed, and the children wonder why and weep in grief and loss, and the mortally wounded keep on living, wounded, and we feel that life has ended, or might as well end.  How many children lose their fathers, and how many fathers leave their children, with loves and affections left unuttered that should have been declared and could have been proclaimed because they were lively and real but wrapped up tight and swallowed?

But I hoped in the Resurrection and the Life, and after years of long days I came alive again and opened wide and told them again and again how I loved them and how I was so very proud of them, and about all the multitudinous ways in which they are marvelously wonderful human beings, and I played Golf and Rummikub and Carcassonne with them, and I baked mushroom quiche and Gâteaux à la Normande and curry cream sauce suprêmes fricassee and artisan loaves on a stone, and we careened down the mountain recklessly and joyfully and thrillingly and laughed at the mud spattered on our faces and backsides, and lay on our beds telling stories of old adventures.

And I kneel bedside and beg the Generous Almighty to bless and guide and comfort and to enhance and enlarge and protect.  For I know that dead or alive I can do little for them, and I know that He Who Knows All understands exactly and precisely what they each need, and I know that the Great Giver opens doors to tattered knocking beggars and that manna settles mysteriously upon each sincere soul.  And I know now that I can continue on both in body and in spirit, at once dead and alive, always dying and living and alive and pressing against the expanding walls of my world and growing to fill the immensity of the universe where the dying ends and where you and I will live forever because that’s how Life works.

(Photo of Blue Columbine by Roger)

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Roger is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.