Friday, June 04, 2010

I Thought I Heard You Laugh

You were always a joyous creature, a child of laughter, a lighthearted soul, and if you had to go, I wish you had gone simply, sweetly, like falling asleep after a long day.

I would have had you laughing till the end. Not diminished until your voice thin and tired barely made it across the phone line that last birthday, when so many miles away, I called.

It was the last time we spoke. You said you were ready to go. Immolated by the blaze of radiation, poisoned by the chemo and then, the two strokes.

Now I understand that you had to go. But I wish you had chosen some other way. I wish you had believed in a merciful God, I wish the angels had carried you off lightly, like a song, half-remembered, like the flutter of butterfly wings, like the whisper of mist. I would have waved goodbye and it wouldn't have hurt so much.

I know you're in a better place now, but your going the way you did has left a bitter corner in my heart.

So today I take back your death. I erase the pain, the deterioration, the indignity of it all.

No!

You stepped into another room.

You dissolved into light.

And I thought I heard you laugh.

4 comments:

Nessa said...

Some people have such hard passings. It makes you wonder how the word justice made it into the language.

Jenn said...

Hey Nessa, I don't know what goes on in these passings...just that we understand them imperfectly and react to them emotionally. And the comforting standbys sometimes don't work.

John Calica said...

This post is too poignant - it makes me want to sleep all day inside a really dark room.

But yeah, it's quite tough to understand stuff like this. There's just too many layers to a passing of this nature and sadly, there's a lot that's hard to comprehend.

Stay strong, my friend. God bless you.

Jenn said...

My dear John, sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull.