(this was written on the train on July 26, 2011, just two days before Meghan LaRocca passed away.)
There are always certain pieces of mortality that you encounter and experience even though they don't belong to you. I don't mean grief, I mean tangible moments of profound clarity regarding the blind injustice and revolting fragility of life itself, moments that seize you and take you by surprise, and you are emotionally pushed to the wall. You give in, maybe for a minute, maybe an hour, a day, a week. Time is nothing. Pain is everything. Then it passes ad you wonder what it must be like for the person actually living the problem. You remind yourself that you are a bystander, close to the crash site but still in one piece.
I wonder in these moments what it will be like to attend everyone's funeral. If death is inevitable, it follows that at some point in my life I will be attending a funeral, and more likely than not it will be a wonderful person's funeral. It will belong to someone beloved and irreplaceable and beautiful, and I will cry an obscene amount of tears, and wonder how I'll ever recover.
This, I suspect, will happen many times in my life, for many loved ones, and it will be exactly the same and absolutely different each time.
I suspect this is how it will be, and I know my suspicion will do nothing for me in preparing me for those moments.
What would the last two years be like if I had cancer instead of her? Or if it weren't either of us, but someone else? A stranger?
I think about everything which makes up a person. All of the time, experience, education; all of the soul and emotion; all of the senses and quirks. I think about her, specifically. All that she was when I first met her, our freshman year of college. All that she is at this moment.
I don't want to write a eulogy. She isn't dead.
I am not writing a eulogy.
I wish I could look through the archives of our souls. I want to read every text we ever sent, look at every moment, the inception of each inside joke, each first experience we achieved while in each other's company or close vicinity.
We take so much for granted because it drives us mad to consider time as irreplaceable. It is foolish to think that because a person is young they have "all the time in the world." What is time? How could anyone possibly have all of it, let alone any of it?
Let alone her?
First of all, it isn't fair to have an incurable disease. That's death cheating the shit out of us, and we're already weak, brief underdogs.
But to have an incurable disease and no biological defenses at all?
There isn't a word for that kind of cheating.
Would it be worse if we lived hundreds of years ago and I had no way of knowing how she was except by carrier pigeon?
Would it be better, not being able to text her and wait for days on end to hear one word of reply?
I wish there was anything at all I could do to make it better, even a tiny bit.
I hope and pray and tell her I love her. That's all I can do. Love is all you can give, first and last and unending.
1 comment:
Very Nice post, Aly.
A couple of days before Sarah passed away I was over at her house and asked if she had been keeping up with all the wall posts on Facebook. She said she was, but it took hours each day to read through them all.
Its strange how much more connected we are now, and I'm still not sure if that makes it better or worse, though I'm leaning towards better.
For those families living further apart, I couldn't imagine just getting a letter from across the country one day with news of a tragic loss. We at least have some (way, way, too little, but some) time to prepare ourselves for the unpreparable.
Like you mentioned, We also have a much better record of many of the things we've done together. We will always be able to go back and look through all the pictures taken and posts made, and remember all the great times.
On a strange tangent, the captcha verification word google is making me write here is Sognozeb. I have no idea what a sognozeb is, but it makes me smile nonetheless.
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