Maria Reyna
I am sitting on a wicker bench in the middle of a field. The sun is tucked behind billowy, soft clouds and a gentle breeze rustles my hair. I can hear the flapping of a red bird’s wings as it makes its way to a nearby cedar tree and the way the wind travels over the prairie grasses. I try to still myself so I can listen, really listen. I am desperately looking for an answer to a question I can’t even form.
The air is calm and easy and yet my gut tenses. In the distance, she is walking towards me and my heart catches in my throat. I stand up to greet her and wrap my arms around her waist, like I have done a thousand times before. I hold tight, wanting to feel every bit of her. She holds me as I softly cry into her chest, she kisses the top of my head, and tells me that she misses me. We stand there for what at once seems like ages and seconds and I start to panic not wanting her to go.
I look around and I am alone. The ache in my heart feels raw, throbbing, heavy. I squeeze the edges of the bench till my knuckles turn white. It’s as if I am trying to wring out the longing for her from my being. A deep breath returns me to my body and I close my eyes to listen for the wind. It swirls around me with a hum of tenderness. Shhhhhhhh, it says, shhhhhh. Easy, child, easy.
Despite its daily occurrence in our lives, death has a way of catching us by surprise. As humans, we have an illusion of permanence to which we hold tight even as the rising and setting of the sun tells us of the impermanence of all things. And yet.
How can it be that you talk to someone everyday and the next day you won’t ever hear their voice again? How can it be that every night you crawl into bed next to the human you love and the next night they won’t be coming home again? How can it be that you walk into every room of your home and see their fingerprints and feel their ghost but can’t ever quite reach them?
Death comes for all things. My knees have begun to tell me they will have an expiration date and beg me to take better care of them. I have always had a baby face, but when I look in the mirror now, I can tell I am close to forty. When I visit the town I grew up in, businesses have closed and the landscaping has grown up around them, my parents walk slower and take more naps, and the faces around town are no longer familiar. I no longer wear a wedding ring and I live alone.
My dear friend lost her baby at three months along. She got to name him and hold him before she and her husband said goodbye. My brother’s childhood best friend died in a motorcycle accident. My brother tells me how they talk in his dreams—the heaviness of grief has changed him. My best friend became an orphan at 39 after caring for her mother throughout her battle with addiction. My mother lost her mother the year before I was born.
How is it that one day you belong to someone and the next day they are gone? How is it that one day you have plans and dreams and the next day they have disappeared? How is it that one day it seems you have all the time in the world and the next day time has vanished? How is it that one day you know who and what you are and the next day you are untethered, undone, floating?
Octavia Butler tells us that God is change. Change is the one constant in a universe of impermanence. A friend once told me that change is the way of the universe. Maybe he had read Butler, maybe he was a Buddhist. So what then? What does one do with this axiom, this universal law? How does one exist, live, love, create, flourish with the knowledge that it will all end, that you will end? The wisdom books of the world would say to be fully in the present moment, that the present is all that exists, that the kingdom of heaven is right now, in your breath.
I stop to listen to the wind again. Shhhhhhhh, it says, shhhhhh. Easy, child, easy.
On a recent personal retreat, I stumbled upon this wicker bench during a morning walk. I took a few moments to rest on the bench and was flooded with the somatic experience of greeting my loved one. Later in the day, these words came pouring out.
Maria Reyna
