Lamentation 6: nothing could come to you

Someone we have known who has passed away often remains startlingly present for us. We may, for example, suddenly be reminded of them by a smell or a view, or by an activity we had shared with them, such as eating – or preparing – a particular dish. Or, in moments of accomplishment or success or transcendence, we may feel the urge to share our thoughts and feelings with them, only to be overcome (yet again) by the realization that it is no longer possible.

More profoundly poignant, however, is a circumstance that the brilliant Spanish author Javier Marías describes in his story Dark Back of Time: “It's frightening to think of hours – soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they're going by – during which our friends and relatives think we're alive when in fact we are dead...” (179)  He captures this from the point-of-view of the person who has died, but consider the implications for those of us among the friends and relatives. We go about our lives assuming that those we know are out there, going about theirs, and we may even have them in our thoughts or plans or actions, only to discover later that at that moment they were no longer among the living.

It can happen in so many ways: I have sent a letter to a friend that came back marked ‘deceased’; Christmas greetings from my family and from me arrived for my grandmother just days after she had passed away; you are awakened from a deep sleep, on a night seemingly like every other, to a call that your mother has died; the truly heart-rending thought of parents planning after-school activities with their children who they don’t yet know won’t be coming home…

In Three Poems for James Wright, the marvelous poet Mary Oliver captures the utter finality of such moments, while also reminding us of the accompanying beauty of the larger, ineluctable cycle of nature, carrying on without us in its own eternal rhythm. 

it was the time
the willows do what they do
every spring, so I cut some
down by a dark Ohio creek and was ready
to mail them to you when the news came
that nothing
could come to you
in time
anymore
ever. (225)

 

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I have taken the selection above from Mary Oliver’s collection New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, my review of which is linked to at right.

Other quotes from Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time can be found here; I read the book before I began doing these reviews, but I can highly recommend it.  My reviews of others of Marias's works can be found here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)