negative grand canyon

The day we buried you I sealed myself off in a way, like, with death an eventuality one should regard the world at such-and-such distance.

I don't remember you clearly alive in good form, only that you were a rare conduit, a conveyor of magic and spirit. Naturally cancer targeted you especially. One might argue the opposite view that angels brought you away to heaven. Or that believing in angels or heaven is cheap dualism that makes it easier to give up on the world, believing that the next or some alternate one is better to invest in. The way I picture it, you’d laugh and argue that logic is a poison that shouldn’t be sprayed near this particular discussion.

Those of us you left behind formed a silent pact to never deal with the loss, to allow it to submerge and grow in force and weight. For 25 years none of us dealt with your absence. We agreed that it should make a missing puzzle piece, the undiscussed key to our family’s bizarre and indefensible tendency toward entropy and isolation. That absence grew into a kind of negative Grand Canyon, not a mountain, I mean, but a colossal hole in the ground filled near to overflow with decades of human refuse, dirty laundry, broken toys, empty bottles, old newspapers, a kind of personal landfill, a museum of disappointment, each of us taking up residence on opposite sides, meeting in the center only when obligation overcomes the dull fear of being buried under a glimmering avalanche of detritus.

I visited her grave one morning this fall. I’d brought my son to meet her, and I remembered again the morning I'd said goodbye. I thought she’d like to meet him, that she might want to see the way his eyes catch light. That I knew now that our distance was the wrong choice, that it was the opposite of what she would have recommended.

I don’t know why I didn’t come to see her sooner. I can’t think of an excuse that’s sufficient. I only know that I love and miss her, that there’s still her magic in the world. That I feel her presence in the way these pines change colors, in the rare way light sustains itself through winter, bursting sudden through the branches of roadside trees.