From the Recesses – Salting the Ocean

Five years on, as I recall the oppositeness of those two losses, I’ve been wondering about how differently the deaths were processed. And as I recently got together again with Liz and Ed and Jen and Cliff and John’s brother and sister to raise a glass for what would have been his 50th birthday, I’m led to speculate about the biological, or possibly the social evolution that our species has undergone to lead us to such different experiences. I think that there is something deep inside and deeply human about the connection between death and memory. When Grandma died there was no violence, no assault. The fabric was not torn. No memories were lost. We grieved, individually and as a tribe, but the funeral rites, while beautiful, did not need to heal. Grandma’s ghost never troubled me. Nothing was left unsaid. I could recall her, but didn’t see her in the wind. Yet, when John was taken by a rogue wave of entropy, I needed – utterly needed – to come together with friends and share the thin scraps of crepe with which we’d each been entrusted, and as such, to again make the world whole.

When Grandma died I never felt as if she’d gone. I can’t say it was a faith in heaven or any kind of hereafter; I just knew she was there, somehow. When John died, even after the stories that night in Flannery’s had been shared and, months later, the memorial service had been rendered, there was still an aching sense of loss. Something was still missing, something vital, even in death.

In the year after John’s death and memorial, I saw him everywhere. Maybe it was guilt for not responding to his letter. I’d see him rounding a corner on the cobblestones of Antigua, and I’d race to catch up to his ghost. I saw him in the subways of New York, just darting onto a train leaving the station, or at the top of the stairs heading out onto a busy midtown street. I saw him in Peru. I saw him on Tierra del Fuego. But I was never able to reach him. Then, one day in the Spring of 2006, after I’d traveled through India with his mother and a number of his friends from his days growing up in New Delhi, I made a trip to Kathmandu. A friend who had traveled there years before told me that I must visit the Boudhanath Stupa, one of the most beautiful Buddhist Temples in the world. The friend, Adam, told me that while he didn’t believe in “all that stuff,” there was still something oddly powerful about the place. I went there with a friend from the trail, Danny Hoy. Each of us had our darkness, and when we arrived at the Stupa, without words, we both wandered off in our own directions, somehow knowing that we’d meet in a few hours, someplace close.

Danny drifted away and I found myself walking up the steps to the top of the temple. Boudhanath is a large dome with three tiers, upon which devotees are constantly working, always rebuilding. It is a gentle place. Maybe the gentlest place I’ve ever been. People work quietly, assuredly, communally. I idled around, stopping to watch old women and young men passing buckets of whitewash to other old men and young women who would reapply a coat where the brilliance had somewhat dimmed. This has been going on for hundreds of years as a quiet act of faith in the unending cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Drawn by another human instinct to climb to the top of a structure, I found myself walking up the last set of steps to the center of the Stupa, from which radiated thousands of prayer flags to the edges of the temple’s foundation. I looked up and saw John. He was walking towards me, smiling. I started to tear up and walked towards him. We closed on one another and, of course, it wasn’t John at all. John was an imposing 6 feet plus of radiant Irish-American spirit. The guy walking toward me was a tiny, humble Nepalese man. But without reason, unless you believe in “that stuff,” he held out his arms, took me in an embrace and said into my ear, “It’s okay. I’m fine. I love you.”

I held him close and said, “I love you, too, brother.”

And somewhere in the world there was a bit of brilliant madness. Finally, I felt John fall backwards, like a towering salt doll, into the ocean.

—–

Michael Tallon is the Co-publisher and Editor-in-Chief of La Cuadra. He is currently compiling a book of essays to be published in the near future. Ojala.

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This article was written by on Monday, April 12th, 2010
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