A Sonnet for Her
Proximity to Death is a Reminder to Live
23rd August 2024
As time proceeds it bears its sallow heart.
The forest floor reveals all its decay
as the clock practices its deadly art,
and turns to dust the memory of sunny day.
But oh! How beautiful the minutes be
that fill our every sense with sheer delight
and stir up inner time – that roaring sea –
of pungent scents; music; warm touch at night.
The hours swell because they pass away.
The bodies and voices that shaped us die.
They were never ours, but a short play
beheld once, then held in imagined sky.
If I look upon you now and start to weep,
it’s ‘cause I’ve learned you are not mine to keep.
24th August 2024
Finding out about her terminal illness on the subway platform, his world seemed to stop. The trains had literally stopped, because someone somewhere else was struck by a train. His eyes looked at the sign on the stuck train – number 8246. He remembers being a member of the thespian troupe – 88241.
It was her thespian troupe. She’s dying, and her thespians, scattered now like seeds across creation, are remembering her, and praying for her, and thinking about the impact she made on their lives. He misses her, and he fills up with regret at his not having called her more often.
He owes his thespian life to her. He owes his closest friendships to her. He owes his pantomimed movement, his awareness of invisible weight, to her.
Hearing the news – well, reading it, someone texted him, he doesn’t check socials enough to have seen it organically online – he thought immediately of the musical he did in her class, of BYE BYE BIRDIE and its opening number – “An English Teacher” – and he thinks about how he’s trying to balance his checkbook, and how that ugly balancing often takes the place of his real desire to be out there, breathing and being and making.
I think that’s how things are, with death. Proximity to death is a reminder to life. To live. To live, as Anne Lammott puts it in BIRD BY BIRD, with “big round hours,” taking in every moment.
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