( – promoted by buhdydharma )
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What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away from us Who wants to live forever Who wants to live forever? |
I watched as you passed by and thought I felt your breath for just a moment on my face, a gentle faerie vapor in the still air of the night. I brushed your hand in my dreams with my hand, an ethereal transfer of warmth from my flesh to spirit to your incorporeal flesh. That moment of space between life and death was filled, again, too briefly with transient comfort of your presence.
But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever
And we can love forever
(also published in modified format at Dailykos)
I started writing occasionally for The Grieving Room series on Dailykos in April 2007, a handful of days before my sister Sharon’s death on April 27th. I’m making a conscious decision to put the period at the end of this sentence for my own personal 2007.
It’s time, past time to pick up the brush and finish the portrait. I stretch a canvas again, and fix the frame to the stand. Then I’ll hang the palette up to dry – a temporary board of many colors displaying all the shades I’ve used as I’ve painted the life of someone I’ve both loved and hated. As only sisters can love and hate.
I take up the brush again and prepare it for another stroke on the canvas I have painted of you in my heart. I add new layers around the face and about the shoulders – quick, before I forget. I draw the finer horsehair bristles touched in midnight black down around the line of the neck; I sponge the excess speckling of burnt sienna from the upper cheeks on right and left. Lightly I scrape the palette knife across the ridge of built-up ochre, smoothing the surface, making it rounder, less prominent. The ridges are hardening …I’ve let the portrait age too long and time is taking over. I daub the edges of the margin around your jawline, purposefully fuzzing the facial impact of your characteristic stubborn chin. I remember when it seemed you approached life with your tongue perpetually stuck out at the world. I mute the darker red here, and increase the pale yellow there – the new layers serve to soften the image. My dabbling is for naught. The face on the canvas blurs and the colors fade.
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“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerunt: Sebulla pe theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.” (Petronius epigraph) “For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.'” |
There’s no chance for us
It’s all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us
Immortality is a memory hung in the gallery of the mind, preserved generation to generation if the doors are thrown open for those who might venture in. So I open the doors once more, this first day of 2008; with this I raise a toast to the end of 2007.
It’s been eight months since my sister Sharon died – diagnosed with esophagial cancer at the end of March and dead by the end of April. Sharon would have been 69 on December 20 – there were nearly twenty years between us as siblings. For those who may be interested, here’s a first Tuesday art walk of word portraits on my sister…
Forever is our today
Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today
Sharon, I hope you are at rest now.
Salve, atque vale.
26 comments
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i didn’t know about your sister, exme. peace for Sharon and for you.
here’s to peace and contentment in the new year…
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just finished a fine shiraz from the Walla Walla vineyards on the eastside of my mountains. Those Cascades, you know. They’re my mountains.
And this is why I rarely drink.
Thank you pfiore8…and good night. Happy New Year, too!
PEACE to you in this new year
when the Three Sisters peak above the fog-laden Willamette Valley, and I am glad I live in the sunshine above the snow line. I love these volcanos
Oh yes…
brought tears to these cynical eyes… with graditude that there is still enduring love and beauty of expression in the face of all that is now
Happy New Year
beautiful……..
recapitulation is a very powerfull part of coming to fullfilment in the loss of another…..
revisiting, integrating……
For so many reasons, they will make me remember you always. I think we all have a tiny piece of code that we give out to others — to help complete them. We receive the tiny codes all the time from others. Sometimes the code fits and enlarges our undertanding, sometimes it is not needed. That’s how I think the soul grows, in a sort of abstract way that I’m not explaining well.
In any event, it just so happens that I’m reading “The Tiger in the Grass” by Harriet Doerr. As I was reading your diaries, I was piecing them into Harriet’s book — because you write so like her and every bit as well.
You know, she didn’t publish until her late 60s.
Sometime, I would like to hear what happened to Todd. I have a particular interest.
Thanks for the code.
John Coffee, like the drink , only not spelt da same.
To see the ugliness in the world every day. Does this sight come with age and experience.
I rather surmise it is they, “them them” who do not want you to live forever because if you did you would be able to point out to younger generations what you learned from your stay in the world.
Now barring that one might indoctrinate the upcoming younger generations that technology is so wonderful that these younger people need not respect the opinions of those “older and wiser” due to their age.
If that fails one could introduce artificial toxins into the enviornment which might cause an elder population to exhibit irrational dementia symptoms.
I do hate to be harsh, my sister died because a silver spoon cokehead nodded off at the wheel during a drive home from college. That and I man I do respect lived for 20 years after doctors said he was loaded with cancer and removed his lung.
It does come down to the value we assign to life and not it’s profit margin.
So beautiful and so sad, too!
One of my few final wishes……don’t lie on my tombstone and I’ll pay attention to how I do this thing kay? My grandmothers sister gave me this poem after her passing.
untimely deaths…everyone of my friends who passed on without stopping to say goodbye was a distinct loss. There were so many this year that I am glad to see it gone. However, two passed just before New Year’s so I spent the day at one funeral service and will be spending tomorrow at another.
They were all so young. My brother was 54, another friend was 46, and the two who have recently passed were in their 60s. It just seems unfair that they didn’t make “three score and ten”.
So many had just recently retired. I counted 12 in all for the year.
It is good to remember them.
Thanks.