Death Keeps Me Company

I awoke that day to a different kind of dawn. Agony erupted. A pain spilled forth like I’d never known before.

A phone call. A howl. A pain too big to comprehend: The Tragedy.

It flooded in through the walls and filled the room, the ceiling, the floors; suddenly, violently, smashing through our hearts and destroying my sanity; a heavy net of agony cast brutally over my entire self and all those I loved.

Safety evaporated. His convictions substantiated: what he felt was insurmountable, death was the only escape. But the question without an answer remained: why?

The beginning of my own pain was sudden; it hit me like a violent partner, hurtling out of the beautiful and into something terrible. But the end is elusive; a slow unstitching of what is now sewn into my soul, into my very essence, into all that I’d thought I’d known.

From that day I was different. My essence forever twisted.

Alone with my thoughts and unable to connect, among children who laughed and played and spent time talking only of tv shows and lip gloss and maybe video games. But what of death? What of pain? What of existence? So ephemeral, so bleak. So inane.

And so death kept me company.

My body grew but my mind stayed fixated, on what a five year old could never have truly explained.

Brains on the wall.

A mother left alone in the hall.

Her son eternally beyond reach, of any resolution or love or peace.

But love him we did, and love him we continue to do. His legacy now entrenched in the story of Us, the story of Who We Are and of Who We Are to Become.

Where to go to, from there?

Connection now synonymous with pain. Love slain, fragmented, untamed.

Held together yet torn apart, in a delicate craft of navigating feelings. Yours and mine.

Reeling.

Dealing.

Healing? It comes slowly.

And while I waited for it to come, waited for a love, that would make it all okay, make the emptinesss go away, the world continued to go by.

And persistently, Death kept me company.

Isolation supports the opinion that anyone who really knew me would run from me. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t give you what you want from me.

I’m too much, and too little, and clutching at my fickle affections will only bring you into a world of difficulty. Yours and mine.

But Death will keep me company.

When there's no one to talk to about the way we're supposed to walk through this downpour of confusion and anger,

It's hard to see how it's all worthwhile, to reconcile being alive, if you can't connect with people, with purpose, with life.

But then

there is beauty in life, and beauty even in Death.

The intensity of connection without direction, the everlasting affections of those who touch us momentarily and make it all so real. The cycle, the wild ride we’re all on, the love that we hold for someone is never truly gone. It’s perfection.

And even in death, they will keep us company.