Read by the author.
I know grief and you may know it too,
but I have reached the age where it
is perpetual—I didn’t know it would be
like this so I’m telling you, who still have
a whole lifetime to forget your grief the way
I forgot Angie, who wore too much eye
makeup, whose skirts were too short for
a seventh grader or so the Girls V.P. said, who
did not come to school one Monday, having
died over the weekend of spinal meningitis
and disappeared from the life she would
have lived while I forgot her as I lived
those years she never had though now she
comes back often looking ahead of her time
in her black skirts and torn fishnets. And
now, when I do not have my whole lifetime
ahead of me, the phone rings and another
has suddenly passed and she is as young
as when I first knew her before her daughter
was murdered and she took her grief
and fought for gun control and became
a counsellor and wrote a play in which time
collapsed and her daughter starred alongside
her—and if you think her having done
all of that and more makes her death any less
sudden it does not which is what makes grief
perpetual amid our ongoing die-off. Yet
I am still here, and this morning I do have
more to tell you—just hours ago the sun filtered
down to the forest floor finding wet leaves
and fir needles and no blackberry vines
because my dog and I had left the trail, she
with her four good legs and I with my one
good one, walking and sliding where only
the deer had passed before us. Or how forty
years ago Bill and I walked every day through
the streets of Florence toward the attic we
had rented in Bellosguardo carrying our
dinner past Santa Maria del Carmine
where inside Masaccio’s man and woman fled
Paradise forever trying to hide their terrible
shame. We could go in anytime we wanted
and drop the lire into the slot bringing light
into the medieval darkness and look upon their
misery, their sorrow, as if they might instruct us
on what or what not to do as we stumbled
through the rest of our lives where now I
remember and return to them because I do
believe memory is a dwelling as singular as
any place we’ve ever lived though in L.A.
the tract where I grew up is a long term
parking lot for LAX and the hill where my
grandparents’ house stood among the oil wells
is a city park—which is all to say that some
of the places you live now may be erased
or resurrected like that park, planted as it is
with native plants, because, of course, it’s still
your choice, the way it was ours who failed at
doing so much of what we said we’d do, failing
you as history has failed all of us. But maybe
you’ll never find what you are looking for,
meaning you’ll keep looking as I was
the other night when I heard the cry of a
female great horned owl and looked up as
she hooted and flew from treetop to treetop
at dusk, and then I did not think of you. I
watched her fly. And finally as for what is
coming there are always signs—just think of
the photo of my parents, divorced early in the
Second World War, on the day they remarried,
she with her wrists bandaged from working
a punch press, he with his hands bandaged
from shrapnel that lodged in his body for
the rest of his life. In the photo, these two people
who are still strangers to me look almost hopeful,
but nothing good will come of it unless I count
my own life, born as I was some years later
of their second-chance union, which took place
as if upon an irradiated funeral pyre the day
after we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima
about which they surely must have known.