Dust

Everything I came to say to you, before I could finally leave.

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I came the day after you died. I came before the earth over you had even settled, while it was still dark and turned and raw, and I stood there in the cold with a hundred things in my mouth that I had saved to tell you, certain, somehow, that you would answer. I called your name the way I had called it a thousand times across a thousand ordinary rooms, and for the first time in my life it went out of me and found nothing to land on. I told you I was sorry. I told you the things I had been too proud or too busy or too afraid to say while you could still hear them, and the earth took my words and gave me nothing back, no turn of your head, no sound of your voice, only the terrible new fact of you being under my feet instead of beside me. I did not believe it. I want you to know that on that first day I did not believe a single moment of it. I kept waiting for the joke to end, for you to sit up, for the world to admit its mistake and hand you back to me. I asked you why. I asked you how a person can be here on one morning and gone by the next, how the whole weight of a life can leave through a door so small that I never even saw it open. You did not tell me. And I went home to a house that still smelled of you and lay awake in the dark, begging a God I was no longer sure I trusted to please, please, let this be a dream that I would wake from.

I came again seven days later. By then the others had gone back to their lives, the way the living always must, and the visitors had stopped coming, and the food had stopped arriving at the door, and the world had done the cruelest thing the world does, which is to keep on turning as though nothing at all had happened. I came to you because you were the only one I still wanted to talk to, and that is its own strange sorrow, that the one person I needed to help me carry the loss of you was you. I sat by the earth and I told you how still the house had become, how I set the second cup down out of habit before I remember, how I turn to say something to you a dozen times a day and swallow it back down. I was angry that week. I will confess that to you here, where no one else can hear it. I was angry that you left, angry at myself for the years I spent as though they were endless, angry at the smallness of my last words to you, which were about nothing, which I would trade my right hand to take back and fill with everything I truly meant. I asked you where you had gone. Not the body, I could see the body’s place, but you, the you that laughed and worried and loved me clumsily and completely. Where does that go. I asked if you were afraid. I asked if it hurt. I asked whether you could hear me at all, or whether I was only a man talking to the dirt, and the not knowing was a second grave that I had to lie down in every night.

I came on the twenty first day, and by then something in me had changed, worn down to a deeper and stiller place. The first wild pain had burned lower, into a coal that does not blaze but never goes out, and I understood for the first time that this had settled in to stay, that it was the weather I would live inside for the rest of my days. I did not come with as many words. I came to sit. I came to be near the earth that held you, because on the days I could not feel you anywhere else, I could at least kneel where I knew your body lay, and let that stand in for a kind of nearness. I am a man who has worked the earth his whole life, who takes it up wet in his two hands and shapes it and knows it better than he knows most people, and it undid me that week to understand that the same earth I have always loved had taken you into itself, that you were becoming again the very thing we are all made from, the thing we are each only lent for a little while. I began, on that day, to ask different questions. I stopped asking why you left and started asking where you are now, whether the soul I loved has found somewhere to rest, whether the One who called you back is holding you as tenderly as I would if these hands still could. I wanted the faith to believe it. I sat there and I reached for it, the old promise that we belong to God and to Him we return, and for the length of one breath I almost felt it, almost felt you carried somewhere beyond the reach of my sorrow, and then it slipped, and I was only a man kneeling on cold ground again, missing you with the whole of my body.

I came on the fortieth day, and I came changed, because somewhere in the long nights between the last visit and this one, you came to me. You came in a dream, in a place where no body can ever follow, and I knew you at once, the way a person knows a beloved voice in the dark before he knows anything else, and you were whole, and you were unafraid, and you carried none of the weight I had been carrying for you. I woke with my face wet and my chest strangely light, and I understood a thing I had been reaching for since that first cold morning. The soul lives on. It has only gone ahead of me, into a temporary place, a realm I cannot see from where I stand, a waiting room between what was and what is still to come, and it is held there, safe, in the hands of the One who made it. What lies in this earth is only the body, the vessel, the handful of dust that carried you for a while and was always going to be given back. I have spent my whole life taking the earth up in my hands and shaping it and watching it return to dust in the end, and I of all people should have known that the clay only ever holds the treasure for a season before giving it back. You were always the thing that looked out through those eyes, and that thing lives still. It has only moved to a room I am not yet allowed to enter. And because you came to me, because you crossed that whole distance to show me your face one more time, I can finally do the thing this day has been asking of me. I can stop holding you here. I can open my hands and let the earth keep what belongs to the earth, and let the One who called you keep what was always His. From now on I will carry you as a light I keep, and I will stop coming to kneel over dust. I will live the way you would have wanted me to live, and I will love the people still here to be loved while they are still here to receive it, because you taught me, by leaving, exactly what that was always worth. The morning is coming up gold over the ground. I have said everything, and I have nothing left to ask that only the living can answer. Rest in your waiting place, and do not look back for me, because I understand it now, and I am going to be all right, and we will meet again in the room beyond this one, where there is no more leaving. I think I have to go now.