Praying


My dead are all buried in crypts so it’s false to go on about worms and dust. Even in a marble crypt, though, something has to happen to the body. I don’t know what that is.

Yesterday marked one Gregorian (not Jewish) year from the day of his death. He’s been buried three days under one year. I don’t spend much time thinking of his body and what it’s doing now but it might be easier to do if he weren’t in that wall.

* * * * * *

His sense of who we are now is a plane--as of ice, almost a skating rink, with our multiple marks like a skater’s blades, crossing it. As well, his impressions contain the fragility and altered bow to gravity of a snowflake.

For him, we’re all very different, and not just from the self each one of us thinks he or she is but also from our manner of identifying ourselves. For him, we are a loose amalgam, a constellation as of stars, each with a different brightness and sometimes almost no light at all. For him, we are other than ourselves. We are another kind of self which in fact begs the question of the possibility of “self.” For him, now, we are one, a soup whose ingredients have melded: we’re a broth, the scent of which he may take a certain delight in, though it’s unlikely he would bother tasting it.  Food is useless to him now. He has forgotten entirely how to use his body much less how to open his mouth and chew. In fact, he has no body.

He is what we make of him, of course, so much like a human being’s relationship to God. He’s an idea now to us, container of memories, impressions, words, and something else sunk inside us that will always defy articulation and thus will go with us to our graves.


                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                                   image: Elenore Leonne Bennett

* * * * * *

Last year, following his death, in one twenty-four-hour period, I took lessons in three different languages. I wanted to see if I could do it. I think I was trying to lose my mind, or find a different part of it. Maybe I was trying to find him. I don’t know.  But since then, I’ve continued with just one language and it has taken me somewhere, not to where he is, though I carry him with me wherever I go.

* * * * * *

We missed the burial by two hours because a strange woman on the plane was taken off, together with her husband, and then their luggage. By the time we arrived at the mid-point, we’d missed our plane to the final destination.

The burial took place only in our imaginations, though of course we know it actually did take place. Our children were there to tell us, and others. But even if we’d been there, the bulk of the work would’ve been imaginative—as it tends to be.

* * * * * *

Fictional characters, even those based on real people, have been beside the point. This has been a year of getting to know the line between life and death, of toeing it while also looking across, or trying to—sailing in a very small boat, with a paddle to help you maneuver. Most people, of course, will tell you that it’s pointless going too far from shore. There are others who encourage you to paddle until you are in another sea.

* * * * * *

Maybe it’s a question of how much silence you’re able to take inside and hold, almost like a breath. How much silence can you stand before you’re choking on it? At the same time, how much silence do you need and what will you do to procure it?

And what does any of this have to do with him?

* * * * * *

When he was still alive, but so different from the man we’d known, we tried to go where he was so that we could continue to know him. It took effort, trying to go there to be with him and then come back to ourselves and everyone else. Mostly, we didn’t mind being with him at all. He reminded us a lot of who he’d once been.

* * * * * *

I know—I keep talking when what’s needed is silence. I keep talking over this faint image, this almost invisible breath, the mark of the skater’s blade on ice, a snowflake you see out of the corner of your eye. It’s everything you’re not aware of—that’s where he is, watching us as we try to live our lives without him. To him, we’re a faint stew, an almost-discernible pattern, the promise of a mathematical equation rather than a cup or a bowl. But it’s contained, all of us for him: we’re a swirl, a fog, going about our business with unanswered questions, dim misgivings, ancient fears.

* * * * * *

It’s obvious that my fictional characters disappeared because their usefulness was overcome by the fact of death—someone loved and gone, in the true beyond.

* * * * * *

What is religion, what is art but the attempt to go over there, beyond where we are, by virtue of our beating hearts?

In desperate cases, the only thing to do is to go inside, stand at an internal precipice, and try to look, if not see.

We fall back on what we know and make small discoveries in moments of forgetfulness. Until they yield, these slips in time are wholly unremarkable. Yet, because of what they sometimes offer, we continue to seek them, stubbornly ignoring the fact that they only come unbidden.

* * * * * *

It’s a song for him, or his song, but always and more so ours. We are here, he is not: it’s our rallying cry to ourselves.

(We who never learned how to pray.)

* * * * * *

We, who’ve lived without prayer or communal shield, visit the hellholes of our private trenches and fear that we’ve lived incorrectly, knowing as we begin to awaken, trembling, that it’s impossible now--far too late--to change our ways.

* * * * * *

In his late days of seeping loss, we saw him whittled to what he most was and had always been: a loving man. It wasn’t just that the social graces, so well-learned, never left him.

He shone on our pitiful entrances, he rained on our clumsy exits.

* * * * * *

I would like to believe (any religion starts right here) that he feels the emanations of warmth from our bodies and little else. Perhaps a kind of swimmingness, a fog, a melting, a steam. I remember him as he last was, his awareness a pinprick of sensitivity—one minute we were there, warming him, and then we were gone.

Now, we’re adrift in fog. It’s been a year of his decomposition and our fighting it. We watch over his wife, our mother as she makes her way toward what is not.

What we’ve become is of no use to him. He monitors our progress by the emanation of heat generated by our bodies. Sitting together at a table for the first time in years, someone wonders why he had to die in order for the family to get together, another lifts her glass to “Grandpa” and his children’s children, boys and girls alike, are blossoms on a branch. He has no vocabulary for these things, no energy to articulate. He offers us the silence that wells around a grave, even when it’s not placed directly in the earth.

* * * * * *

A year later, we lay him to rest more firmly by taking off our mourning garments. We strew petals as we walk to mark the spot.

We tell ourselves stories no different from lies—harmless, we hope—in order to make a place for ourselves here where he is not and death most certainly is.

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