I’m sitting in my classroom with a kid whose brother I taught. Sometimes I accidentally call him by his brother’s name, but he doesn’t mind. He eats lunch in here, too, with about 10 to 15 other kids pretty much every day. It’s another bizarre testing week, so he’s here waiting to take in a review session at 9:30A. I’m here to show my face.
In the last 48 hours, two people I really like, people who’ve touched me, make me smile, charmed me, have died. I’m not in the same country as either one, so their deaths are… fumes and smoke in my consciousness. All I have is my memory and my imagination. But my memory and my imagination are in overdrive, so I understand that they’re gone.
I imagine that other things, physical things, will make their deaths real. Like, when I visit Canada in June and the hole in my family is evident in and on the faces of the those who are there now moving through the immediate, crushing, physical loss of my cousin’s beautiful young son. (My cousin was once an identically beautiful young boy. I remember. We were kids together.)
When next I go to Grenada, I will visit the home of a man who was pure energy, pure movement, pure wit, pure humor! I will see his kids (we were kids together, too) and grand kids and wife (who was my mother’s best friend when they were young) and miss him.
Right now, the morning birds are singing, chirping, calling to each other. They really are! It’s incessant.
