Voicemail

There are days, much like today, that I feel as if I have been gutted. I reach for the phone to leave you a message, to sing songs to you in your voicemail and I realize I will never again do that. Today I have spent hours in bed, trying to muster the strength to go to work tonight. I hear your voice telling me to get up. I stare at your pictures. I try to remember every little thing. I remember how you laughed your little baby laugh. I remember how you danced. I remember how you said that you forgave me for everything and how I never accepted your forgiveness.
Is it time now, Jonathan, to finally accept it? Because inside I am going to self destruct with guilt and shame.
I grieve for what could have been and what is.
The pain in the center of my chest...well, now I know what absolute heart break really is.

Expansion

 
 I am reading in the book, “Bearing the Unbearable,” that grief is a process of contraction and expansion. It says that is how we grow. I’m tired of growing. I just want you to come back. Or send a secret message that the ashes I received are only burnt wood. And that you are just in a witness protection program like in the movies.

     I finally took the kayak out. I thought that being in my happy place felt like I was somehow abandoning you. The day was extraordinary, much like you were. Billowy, bright, suprising, and a little bit scary. The wind was at my back on the way from the dock to my favorite place where the water lilies are now greenish-brown and sinking, but the trees around the cove were burning brightly in the early autumn sun. I saw a grey crane take flight over me and I felt your presence with me there as I quietly took in the natural order of things.
     To get back to the dock, the starting point, was tough with the wind working against me. I paddled harder, with the sun now warming my face; the cold water slapping at the cumbersome orange spectacle I was sitting on. I rowed past the dock quite a distance, only so I could drift back toward it and take in the light bouncing from ripple to ripple and the rustling red leaves and the open canopy of azure blue sky.
Jonathan, I sang to you, I sang softly to the sky; September Song. Did you hear it? Please say that you did.
Please say.

....and these few precious days,
I’ll spend with you...these precious days, 
I’ll spend with you.

Ghost

Dear Jonathan,

In the photo below is me before your funeral. I wore the shoes for you. I knew you would get it...my reason for wearing them. 

And Jonathan, I will try to love autumn again.

The Michigan air is cooling and the leaves are turning to flame. I have memories of walking with you amongst the fallen leaves; stopping along the way to bend to the earth and choose an extra specially colored one to take home to display...Our feet shuffling along the road. The sound of it is still in my ears.

And Jonathan I can’t go into the meat cooler at work anymore. I could before but I can’t now. For reasons I’m not sure I can articulate. It’s something about being there in the cold, around the flesh that is no longer animated, the  finality of it. I can’t explain it. Maybe because I was there with you in the cold for so long. Lying beside your naked body in a drawer  waiting to be warmed again and then released by  fire. 

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

Your body once existed inside my own.  
I pushed you out into the world.
The world consumed you.

I am just a ghost now, Jonathan. I can smile. I can even laugh.

But I am a ghost with my nose pressed against the glass of my former self. On the other side lives hope and renewal and a black and white photo of you and your siblings all together again at Christmas.
What do I do with that?

Bones

It’s 6. I’m sitting in the van after work. The alarm for my meds goes off. Mechanical. Methodical. That is how my days have become.

I wash the pill down with 2-day-old coffee sitting in the cup holder.

My eyes are sore and dry from always being so wet.

Acquaintances and friends come. They hold me throughout the day.

They say they are so sorry.

I say I am too.

I hold it all surface level. Like a glass full of water about to spill over. Surface tension.

Until I get safely to the van where I can cry loud and ugly and no one can hear it.

This grief is a voracious, rabid animal ripping you from my flesh.

Bone exposed.

I am a rack of bones moving through the world. 

I am teeth in a skull in the desert. An eternal grimace in the sand. 

Which is still more than you are now...black ash, wet with rain.

Stardust

We had a little secret, you and I, when you were tiny. 

When your father worked nights and the apartment was quiet and dark, I would put on my favorite Willie Nelson Album and slow dance with you, and sing softly in your ear.

Your tiny wisps of breath on my neck as you slept.

You were all mine. My first true love. The first real love of my life. I had no idea that my teenaged heart could hold so much.

I sang you to sleep.

And now you sleep forever.

I see you in my dreams, in some other place. Sometimes smiling at me, taking over the horizon with your light.

There is not a single second that isn’t consumed with the longing for you now.

For this all to be a dream.

For all the singing into your voicemail not to all be for naught...the letters begging you to please return to me somewhere in a landfill.

All day I put on a face to meet faces and after work I crash into you.

I scream your name into the wind as I drive home in the evening; relentless tears streaming down my face.

My stardust baby, it cannot be. Where have you gone?

.......sometimes I wonder why I spend, the lonely nights dreaming of a song;

The melody haunts my reverie ,and I am once again with you.....

https://youtu.be/Hf5UvKjCDUU

Ancient Oaks

My grief is a bottomless chasm.

A deep and dark unfillable hole.

Even the ancient oaks here weep for you with their reverently bowed branches and Spanish moss raiments trailing in the evening breezes.

The moon is bright and full and the air thick with tears that mingle with sounds of the southern evening.

The crickets sing low with longing.

I close my eyes.

I hear your voice.

Mom, please don’t cry anymore.

The Gulf Shore

You are the shadows of shore birds over the water. 

You are here, but you are not.

You are the puffs and billows of clouds in the bright dome of the sky. Transient and beautiful.

You are here, but

you are not.

Bowling Green

We have made it to Bowling Green. 

Every mile I drive, I move toward the finality. 

The moon 3/4 full in an empty sky except for a single star. A single pinhole in a black canvas. 

Son, is there really more?

Are you somewhere out there beyond the stars?

Are you with God?

Were you welcomed by familiars?

Are you without or within, or both?

I repeat your voice; your laughter, inside my head over and over. I am terrified I’ll forget how you sound.

I call your voicemail several times a day just to hear the greeting.

When all is still and dark the tears come. I allow them to fall and run over my cheeks to fill the tiny cups in my ears.

My chest is so heavy with the regret and the questions and the weight of the unfinished.

Lazarus

You saturate every waking moment, even my dreams, with your absence. Such deep grief. Empty spaces. Lost hopes.

Your sister here after a date night, so beautiful, so radiant. Little Vinnie and his pretend world, the sincerity and sweetness and silliness of your youngest brother Jeremy...you will never know these things. 

I go to bed. Saturating the pillow with tears.

Sleep never comes and I lay awake and stare into the darkness. 

What could I have done....what could I have done...what could I have done to change it....

I would trade my own life to make you whole again. To roll the stone away.

3:38 a.m.

The moon is just a sliver. It’s 3:37 a.m.

Everything I experience is tainted with grief.

Everything is stained with it.

September 9th 2018

My whole body weeps
My chest gurgles with unspent tears.
I struggle to breathe. 
I cough.
I sigh.
My friends tell me to breathe.
I lay here motionless,
pain in my lungs.
Jeremy practices his piano blindfolded, a YouTube challenge.
I hear it but I’m not present.
I am there in the cold quiet. I am there in the darkness with you.
I am lying beside you. Touching your beard, noticing the redness of it. Like your father’s mustache.
I count The tiny moles on your face and neck.
We await together the fire that will consume your body and turn it to ash.

Guardians of the Galaxy

The sky is purple tonight and the leaves are rustling. I feel you in the coolness of the evening air. 
Your sister and your brothers watching Guardians of the Galaxy and I know you are on their minds as they watch.
As I lay here, Vinnie plays with the old cork rifle and retrieves the lost flag in the battle raging in his little creative mind.
Lola lays on my legs, and tries in vain to soak up my grief. I see it in her tiny brown eyes...she feels my internal anguish.
The smell of Ken’s goulash wafts into the room and mixes with the scent of pine and spice from the candle burning by your photograph.
I lay here and type, the light from my phone the only illumination in the room. Laughter comes from the living room; a chorus of familiar voices that settle me. I am grounded in their presence. They are here. They are living. Their laughter, a respite from the pain of loosing their big brother. 
I am immersed in the moment. The autumn air, the blabber of the tv, the lives in the next room. But also my thoughts are with you. I carry you as I always have, in my heart.
In my mind I trace your wrists, adorned with the rubber and beaded bracelets of the day. Your long fingers, the curve of your fingernails, the smoothness of your skin that I once lovingly bathed. 
You were always so animated, so full of life. And now you are so still.