Morning Thanks--"Something that wants to be shared"

How we tend each other's grief is never easy. 

I didn't see him coming. We stepped opposite ways through an open door last night. I wasn't expecting to see him, nor he me, I'm sure, but there he was, with his son, a blonde-haired young man he introduced. I don't think he remembered my name so I filled in the blank for him. His son was visiting, for obvious reasons.

He's alone now, has been for several months, although I can't imagine that it feels like a long time since Covid took his wife, so quickly too, so hellishly unforeseen.

But the two of them were not young, and they were eligible. The thing is, the virus took her before they were ready for one of them to be gone, if they or we ever can be fully ready. When it did, it took all of whatever life he could have imagined along with her because you can't plan anything without the spouse you've spent the last sixty years beside. He'd never considered being as alone as he is now, as he's become.

"There are wonderful people at Landsmeer," he told me, the Home he's found to replace the one she left. They'd planned to move already before she'd gone, I guess--it was in the plans, the only plans they'd had.

 
"'It's a God thing,' people say," meaning his living in a new apartment in the Home. I think he wanted to be sure that to him, at least, nothing about his wife's dying could be attributable in any way to the Almighty. Others may say it that way, those friends who stop by to play cards or chat, who stop by to comfort him. And they may say it because he knows it's true too, even if he can't get himself to say it. The old Calvinist knows and believes in the Father's iron-clad will, but that doesn't mean he has to like it, her being gone, I mean. "My kids say I didn't know how to fry an egg," he says, giggling a little. He looks over at his son, and I do too, who's smiling too.

I tell him that I'm glad to hear he's over there because too often I drive past his house and think about how alone he must be in that place without her. I'm smiling when I say it because, like I say, tending grief is never easy.

It was just Father's Day Sunday--his son is spending a long weekend, he says, belovedly. With the new place established, he gets into the car, a nice one, I notice, and the two of them are off. 

I have no idea if he likes poetry, but I can't help thinking maybe he does more so now than before she left him behind and so very much alone. I don't know. But this poem turned up this morning.

It's his, all his, and this morning I'm thankful to have begun the day with its blessed imagined picture of him, but then, surely, someday of you or me too.

This Is How It Will Be*

You'd already said goodbye,
but I wasn't sure you were already gone.

Emerging from the bathroom, I called your name,
wanting to know if you'd read the news item
about the two women who got lost in the woods,
then were rescued and driven to their car,
then drove their car down a boat ramp in the fog,
at the bottom of a dead-end road—
and drowned.

"Honey?" I called, realizing
I was alone in the house.
Realizing that this is how it'll be,
for one or the other of us, someday:
Something that wants to be shared
will be unheard.

                                         Barbara Quick

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*from The Writer's Almanac