When I Have Fears...Ode to all that has been lost and those that have lost and all that are afraid..like me

There must be something to be said to the dead. A word, a song, a poem, a book even. Perhaps not so much to ease the pain, just to reach out. The pain never eases, it just takes on different forms on different occasions. A long stare into the unfathomable distance for example, lost in the darkness of a singular imagination, a solitary walk maybe the mind a hive of activity, a longing for what could have been an inventory of the loss incurred. It is all pain, finding different ways of expression.

It should have been written on your face the moment you lifted whatever was left of your neck, looked and managed a smile, the bones jutting like sticks used to prop your head. Still we hoped. And then a smile. A sheer baring of the teeth, the cracking lips glistening from some overzealous application of Vaseline. They wouldn’t stop the cracking. The diarrhea evacuating whatever little fluids the body held with the rapidity of a tank with a million holes. The skin clung on, it should have fled, but it clung on, its former ebullience reduced to wrinkly reminders of former positions occupied, the rubicund appearance of a healthy face long lost to forlorn times. In its place a vacant look, a flicker of recognition, the aching appearance what was supposed to be a smile.

Still there must be something to be said. Even just for the sake of the times when all was well. When genuine laughter rang, not with the efficiency and regularity of an alarm, but with the spontaneity of pure unbridled joy. The joy of children returning from school, of the raucous jokes about neighbors, workmates, superiors and everyone in-between. Of meals, happy meals shared with such abandon. The stories told with rapt attention surely must stand for something, the anecdotes repeated with clock monotony yet managing to elicit the same response, out of respect out of genuine reaction, it doesn’t really matter.

There must be something to be said about dreams, lost achieved, birthed. Dreams tugging at the belly, of unfinished houses of academic credentials pursued of seeing children go on to become, to achieve and to live. Something to be said about careers, the love for and of friends, the gatherings, the life, the essence, the being itself.

Was it all lost, with only hands folded behind our backs as we left the graveyard, to leave you to rot and be fodder for termites and maggots. We shrugged our shoulders, a certain finality, they called it “putting to rest”. Rest from the life that you were so full of, rest from the love that continues to pour forth from us, our hearts lacerated in a thousand places, each fissure bleeding and with every drop a reminder that you are not here. We write these memories and let the wind in, we harvest it, we let it blow to those you touched and those who need to know you. Maybe you continue existing in the wind, our last connection being the flutter of leaves, the whiff of a breeze the fluttering of a bird’s wings.

Perhaps you see, smile to yourself and chuckle…how cruel. Perhaps it is all darkness and we too await, tittering on the brink, delaying the inevitable. Yet the darkness calls, ours a slow lumbering answer, till one day we too tilt and into the abyss we plunge. A consolation, a hope maybe, a yearning that we shall find you there. For how you bear darkness without the only light that you have known is depressing. How to face all of this without the voice in your ear, the one shelter you run to.

Life gradually turns into a slow trudging towards our meeting with destiny. Its just that all of this would have been much easier, much more easily bearable, had you been here.