Bones

Hive …unframed paper, pencil, nails, thread

Once when I was first kissing my husband we tapped our teeth together, I ran my tongue beneath his lip and said, I like touching your skeleton. Sometimes we notice our bones when they creak and ache, when we watch the fingers of a musician at work, when we hear the thud of accidental contact with a hard surface.  Mostly we forget.  Last year my best friend died in her sleep beside me.  We drove her body across state lines to a place she loved, dug her grave and lowered her in.  I knelt in the grave with her head in my hands between my knees and gently tucked the earth around her body.  Slowly I climbed out and with my bare hands filled her grave with soil.  We planted a tree above her bones and I visit there every night in my dreams.  A dear friend and mentor died two weeks later and - because I never saw his body, I never really said goodbye - I cannot understand that he is gone.  

There is a finality with death that is unimaginable until we try to reckon with the realization that no amount of missing, wanting, aching to touch, or hear a lost love will bring them back. The emptiness created by death rips a hole in the heart that physically aches and does not heal; it simply forms a scab so thin that it tears or falls off over and over again.  The only chance we have at walking bravely forward is in recognizing that life is surely practice for dying, for letting go.  Our compassion weaves into thick blankets when we understand and respect that all who have come before us and all who will come after will lose the ones they love.