Obit 10 (for the Giraffe part)
My job was to synthesize random and unique news blips from all over the world. One particular day, I had just finished a descriptive paragraph about a body dumped in the giraffe enclosure in the Ukranian Zoo, and the lead-in was really good. Really some of my finer work.
Then suddenly the passage was gone. Where did the giraffe part go? Ctrl Z. And again. Maybe a different document? Untitled 5. No? No. No dead guy in with the giraffes.
There’s absolutely no telling how these things happen. Everything autosaves all the time. There’s external hard drives filling every available hole like my computer is some sort of hardcore porn star. Things don’t make sense for a moment.
***
This same afternoon, I throw away books for the first time in my life. Most were philosophy books from college, marked up with in-the-margin-scribbles, ostensibly the short-hand answers to everything.
There was water damage and black mold that could be blamed on no one and most certainly not my ex (nor his passive-aggressive roommate), and really my ex had been so generous (he reminded me) in having stored my books for so long (he reminded me) anyway.
While cleaning, I find a letter to my ex from someone with a sad housewife’s desperate penmanship. The date on the letter coincides with our time. The letter says nothing I want to know and of course read it anyway. Twice. Just to be sure I have this right.
I’m old enough and human enough to know that if you go looking for something, you’ll certainly find something, but this was not that.
This unexpected afternoon storm occluded an otherwise blue sky, our year together. There had been joy, certainly. There had been love. Art. But the new information about the other woman seemed insistent on pushing out the story I knew. Irony can create incredible confusion, but it can’t change truths, not even the ones it hides.
***
‘Loss’ should be absence, should be not-there. But it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly heavy. I want to tell it that it’s no good being a dichotomy, that it’s super uninteresting, really, so 90s-angsty to be that way. I want to tell Loss to get whole with itself, go to a self-awareness retreat or do a cleanse–whatever it takes for Loss to go a little easier on us all.
***
I make a list of the books I throw away so I can replace them, knowing that I will likely not replace them. I preoccupy myself with trying to reconstruct the phrasing that made the lead-in about the dead guy in the giraffe enclosure so good. I am aware I have lost several important things this day, but fail to prioritize them, cannot exactly name one of them.
I want to know the mechanics of how to bear the weight of having lost a thing you cannot reproduce or replace. And I bet the answer was in one of those philosophy books I threw away; I bet the dead guy in with the giraffes knew the answer, too.
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Obit 9 (for Everything Not Written in Time)
Years ago when we used to tear shit up even at baby showers, my friends would say, “You have to write this. This is hysterical. This is too much.”
Years later, I did. –Only I wrote about your babies instead, and what began as a howling joke about another friend ended up being an astute observation about us.
Time has a nice, cruel way.
So when, after all these years of not-writing, I finally start to write–everything starts to get a little bit good. Its voice is coming into its own. Just then the phone rings and I use that same voice to answer the phone (it’s the only one I have, after all) and she says right off: “I’m just saying that if it was my family, I’d ask you to take it down.”
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Obit 8 (for Another Moment with Mom)
She looked at me but kept pouring wine while she did and she said, “Honey it’s 1:40 in the morning. You’re going to regret this tomorrow.”
And I said, “Mom these are not the things we regret.”
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Obit 7 (for the Robin’s egg)
I was mowing the lawn and trying to do it like the golf courses, like I liked.
I stopped short right by the base of the pear tree because I didn’t want to run over the anomaly. I had fixed the mower enough times to not make this mistake again.
I released the gas, the motor purred to quiet, and I approached the bright blue ball. It wasn’t a toy; it was a robin’s egg.
I had never seen one before but I knew what it was when I saw it. There’s no mistaking that most perfectly unbelievable turquoise.
I looked up at the barren pear tree, not yet flowering, a spectacular bony structure against the white winter sky. I saw the nest, visible and vulnerable.
I got the tall ladder and a pair of sterile gloves from a first aid kit, knowing that the egg would be useless if there was even a whiff of humanity on it.
I placed the egg back in the nest with a sinewy, tall, hopeful reach.
When I got back down the ladder, I reflected on how much care I’d taken in something no one else would ever see.
And I knew my 15 year relationship was over.
I went out the next morning, dragging out the tall ladder again to check on the egg in its nest.
And what can I say?
There were just too many crows in that neighborhood.
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Obit 6 (for the obits)
With these obits, I never meant to trick you into poetry.
If anything, that two-time poet laureate of ours Billy Collins tricked you first when he wrote that book called, “The Trouble With Poetry.”
I know that you know that there’s a lack of poetry in our lives. This is as obvious and honest as unfinished wood is prone to splinter.
Without poetry, Nabokov wouldn’t have painted in pointillism the beautiful nuance of disappointment in humanity. Without poetry, Lydia Davis wouldn’t have captured the horror and disgust of a lingering dog fart. Without poetry, we’re just a sequence of mad, missing moments.
But still, I don’t want to trick you into it. I was just trying to impress you. I didn’t mean the poetry to be pretense.
So join us today in celebrating the death of the poetic obit, where the first-person ordinarily yields to the third-person. Today we celebrate the first-person taking charge, despite its always having been the far less trustworthy narrator.
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Obit 4 (for those who keep stars on hand)
She was 6 when she learned about Orion’s Belt. The constellation matched the three equidistant freckles on her left hand, the only real reason it was of interest. She knew she was part of something larger, and that was enough to know at that age.
The constellation is easy to see in Winter’s sky almost anywhere, and it always shows around the time of the Epiphany. The three stars are technically blue giants or super blue giants, meaning that they will still be recognizable long after other constellations will have distorted into new configurations.
She had read somewhere, could not forget, the idea that you only ever die the last time someone says your name.
In the suburban driveway of her childhood home, 34 years later and around 1:30 a.m., surrounded by moving boxes from two different storage units, two different cities, two different relationships, and more bad decisions than that, she scans the night sky and finds Orion’s belt again.
Looking up from her ex’s backyard at New Year’s, she had seen the stars on hand, an admonishment; they were there enduring that lonely, polar winter on Long Island, too. They were there the entire December in Rome, hung every night above the Vatican no earlier than 9.
She mistrusted the lines on a map; was a daughter to many philosophies, and spent a lot of time marveling at how well-tailored to its humans the scale of the earth was, even with its winds and rains. Orion’s belt on her hand was a stamp of origin.
Join us any day in celebrating all those who keep stars on hand, a testament to the origin of iron in our blood.
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Obit 3 (for the Artist)
“…Had all the qualifications of an Artist. She had it.”
Fundamentally, we all have the “It.”
And she had it in spades, too, but couldn’t figure out the right place or the right time, except as it passed and passed and kept right on passing in that annoying, quantum way.
The inability to connect (to the people, to the point) gave her the time and space to build the steely, internal infrastructure that became both the framework for a body of work and the beam from which the Artist was later found hanging.
Join us any day in singing the unsung despite having voices that became small. Allow our voices to crack with uncertainty, regret, and plain old sadness as we sing them up to the skies.
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Obit 2 (for the View from Here)
She wanted to always see the sky, the stars. The sea was fine, too, but too scary go inside.
The sky was something she was always inside. The moon was something always inside her. Whether the visible space was just a patch or swath, the sky be healthy in any of its moods.
She wanted her loved ones to look up and to know that it’s certainly going to change tomorrow but it’s always going to be there.
Join us any day in celebrating the most vast empty (the sky, the self) as it takes on the azure of others.
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Obit 1
She was an occasional regular.
The men she loved have the gardens to prove it, and the women she loved no longer live in the country. Or they became men.
She was a woman who always wished that her mother would just say.
She had written only one truly great metaphor:
“Innocence is a dandelion, lost to the breath of time.”
Too bad she wrote this metaphor at 14.
She never divorced because she never married, but when she left she knew she had to leave the cats behind in order to get out. There will be some furniture left over. Don’t panic.
Join us any day in celebrating life, as it is, motivated by deadlines and seasons.
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