Nature’s response to my deluge of sorrow and grief is to make its mist muck up its intransigent beauty, for Les Pierres austerely bears this vile violence that made us fall short from now on as a full-bore family without Captain Blackpaw present to securely sketch the contours of our awarenesses.
His abrupt ended reign turned out to be far more comprehensive than what he was credited for in his wee stay, endorsing the wretched facts of all life lost droningly but condensed into his own sudden demise.
It really is such an intimate yet tedious trick out of my own private playbook, where pain gets submerged to balance felicity all the time, as if the one without the other would not exist. Modus operandi, modus vivendi.
“Sweetly yet unforgettably dance me”, my mom would instruct us all the time, solidly departed on her journey into the unrelenting fog that would eventually engulf her whole reality: “And then I would be the daughter and you would be the son. Somebody else could be the holy spirit, right? Or was he family too?”
Those days the nightingales would still sing tirelessly, but their concert in the dark could never please her, at all. Outwardly concerned: “ Will tomorrow be black, again?” “Black?” “Yes, because of all those sleepless dead birds…”
Saying goodbye straight after these moments of intense darkness, could easily turn things around again and even make joy fly by:
“Are you going to do something fun, mom?”
“Well, today I’m going to die…”
“Oh dear. Why would you want to do that?”
“Why indeed. Have you gone mad?”
The website I created in collaboration with my sister, where we would daily portray her time slowly passing by, both of us angry because of its hiddenness, by now has become obsolete and its content technically unattainable, today leaving delete as its endmost option, nearly ten years after her passing.
Morose, but after a casual, ingrained ‘mom-where-are-you’ about an hour ago, she still gives me updates every fifteen minutes: “Upstairs and downstairs; in the fog; very maybe here; everywhere, everywhere, where… ”
And just when she drifts back to join all the others, her indisputable wittedness arrises comfortably:
“I am still true.”
