Scott R.I.P.
We shouldn't forget, with all this Quicksilver Times business, that this is, finally and always, about death.
And here Death is again.
Have called Death my familiar for couple of decades now, and it was for decades before I claimed it.
My boy Scott is dead.
He was a sorta son. Lived with us a few teenage years, my sister’s boy. Was broken, Scott was, but beautiful.
Two days before my three-quarter century birthday - last week, I watched him take his last breath.
Can’t pretend that I’m anything but fogged about it. All the old memories jumbled up together, the terrible process of the leave-taking, the morphine titration that depressed his respirations and set him free after almost two days instead of compassionate release so much earlier, the inability to find and hold close to the boy, and man, I loved in the Cheyne-Stokes breathing brokenbrokenbroken body we all sat with, has left me tired in a new way.
Not even sure what that means. But it reminds me and draws what focus I have to the passing. The almost unbearable passing. Light to darkness. Darkness to light.
At Scott’s memorial service I could find the light that Scott radiated. But only in its absence. And in the hundred faces I spoke to that night I felt a gathering together, a multifaceted dark star gathering in solitude seeking connection. And they did. We did. Even that dark connection was temporary.
After the ritual, as we shared cookies and coffee, tea and famous Sheboygan dessert “bars”, the darkness was tempered, the connection sweet. But even as we shared I could feel them being drawn outward. The ritual done, the darkness validated, now lean back into the whispering solace of the waiting world. Slip back into the moment -so busy, so intriguing, so scary… Pass back.
Now a week has passed. And I struggle for balance. Easter is tomorrow. This Easter Saturday - which we hardly notice, sandwiched between Good Friday and Easter Sunday - attend with me the loss of beautiful Scott - of all this passing.
Is there new understanding of the passing? No, I don’t think so. But it is a repetition. And it needs proper attention, and as many moments as are needed to absorb and heal.
Always, and endless, the passing. And the love.
And in the revolution I call you to, the awakening of each heart births out of the courage to live through and examine the passing. To love through it. And to share it.
You are the revolution. You are tomorrow’s Dawn. You are the Easter. You are the risen.
I love you.
bill
