Today started with getting stranded at the intersection of Barbur and Terwilliger, so I will gladly accept a lift in the form of a shoutout in John Blase’s debut at Substack:
Mr. Blase’s arrival in this neighborhood of the internet is both welcome and well-timed because this post you’re reading was already in draft.
Last week, John posted, via fellow writer Kenneth Tanner, this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
These words ricocheted around inside me a bit and then I thought, That’d make a great prompt for my groups. And this inclination was correct! So now I’ll share what I wrote, which I won’t pretend is in Annie Dillard’s league, but is certainly inspired by her, and John, and Ken, and all the other dear and scarred companions who dig deep on questions like these.
I am getting along. In early days there was a haze, like gauze over all things, and every day was full of errands—remains to gather, wills to notarize, books to box, cupboards to clear—and as the months stretched out and we moved and settled into a new home, those tasks and the gauze dissipated until what remained was a dry-nosed midnight desolation, a restlessness inside like a pacing caged tiger. I wondered if the feeling was akin to the profound wakefulness she experienced while dying.
Then years passed where I went to therapy twice a week for a while, then once until my therapist retired, and there and at Dougy, and in little moments everywhere else, the swirling sadness and high-flying denial receded incrementally until there were whole weeks without tears, and the new life—where I decided the furnishings and how to arrange the art and what to eat for dinner every night—slowly overlapped the old.
And now I don’t feel so much in mourning as someone whose loss is eight years old, to whom history kept marching. She wanted to awake and find us all there—the end of time no more than a blink away—and now I wonder: how different will we be? After decades passed among decaying nations, and hers in unseen dimensions. Or asleep. How will that family—only four years together—ever be again?
I guess, then, there is now and onward, though sometimes she makes a cameo—a recollection of laughter, broken coffee mug, a flash of grin, or glint of red in the hair of her daughter—and I wonder.
“Though sometimes she makes a cameo”. Beautiful.
You inspire me.