For Terry: A Song Of Dying

It drifts into, through and out of everything and everyone, coming and going like a house cat, quiet, soft, ever present. Even when not spoken of, it's heard and thought of in little flashes that clip the edges of your mind, stealing them away from that upon which you know you must now focus.

At least for me it doesn't boom loudly any more, but only murmurs with a resonant, resolute echo off in that distant somewhere that isn't me, isn't us, but just ... is. It tolls. Have you heard it? It hasn't gone away. And we move so quickly, think so fast, run so incessant and unceasingly these days we expect everything to go - away, soon, already. Please?

The soft, labored, we can only wonder ... death-racing breath of a young woman, never seen, known, touched or felt by most, yet known to all, floats above a body we have pictured and are forced to picture still ... as it rests, struggles, lives, dies ... do we really know? Will we ever really know? No, not really. Not really. We can never really know for she is everything. And nothing.

Life, death, anger, joy, pain, freedom, what? What is it she isn't to us now, besides dead? My God, how awful the words that dance beneath the thoughts.

Will she die? Can she die? WOULD SHE JUST SIMPLY DIE! What is it, after all, that I, and you, really fear, I wonder? Death? Or life? I suppose it can differ. But she is both life and death, too, for us, for now. How confounding.

So still she lies, a wrapped, weakly breathing innocent intruding upon a national consciousness we might have once thought innocent, too; only now, disturbed by the grim reality of a single communal death we must all embrace, she strips away the great protections of our so convenient, too noble innocence, until all that's left is ... just us – exposed … and raw.

Or maybe it's that which we fear the most, now ... the us. We didn't help us, did we? No matter where you figure in the equation. No, some ciphers are just too hard to solve, I suppose.

The giant collective we screamed at ... everything. God, President, Priest, Prince and King ... but no one helped. In the end that hasn't yet but will soon come we're left with nothing, nothing but the screaming, now just at one another and also to no great effect.

I suspect that's how it will be when each we go, too - screaming, but to no good, bad or real effect. For we will have to go, too, won't we? Yes. We know that now together because of her.

See, this one won't go quietly, or unexpectedly. No. Not like the late night phone call that leaves the tears upon your pillow for the life you lost. Not like the quiet of a waiting room outside the door from which doctors emerge to inform and so console you of an end, ... the end, your ending, alone. No, this one won't go ... too quietly. This one will go through the air and not just go for you.

On radio, TV, late night talk, office talk, community chat or blog posting this one will go for us with a primordial scream facilitated by the very best technology of our time ... none of which could stop the going. Perhaps they're not all really so wondrous and powerful after all, these things. Perhaps, neither are we. Perhaps nothing is in face of death.

Whatever it is, whatever we are, whatever we will be and become in that minute, we will be a we - and that's so, … different. Ironic that a nation can lose and bury thousands in one fell swoop of terrorism and be brought together ... yet lose just one so public innocent and seem to tear it self apart.

So, I wonder … why is it, God, that in witnessed piles of bodies by the thousands we can bury our secrets, our own little deaths, and even ourselves; yet, in the face of just one so publicly lost innocence find ourselves so vulnerable and alone, together - truly and finally exposed?

Comments

[chrys]

This post is why I keep reading :) "Yes Virginia," men really are sensitive.