When Magical Thinking is Difficult

Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, describes very accurately what mourning has been for me. I live in the world where objects hold not only memories, but possibilities. Clothing still waits to be worn. Emails wait to be sent. Like in the movie, Tell No One, I expect to get an email which shows a cryptic video of Karen shopping in Taiwan.

It is unfathomable to me that all of a miracle can be reduced to pulp -- I think this is what Shakespeare meant by "instant putrefaction" in Troilus and Cressida. When someone dies instantly by being crushed, if you must look, and I only have the coroner's report, the body is all bruise. So, plaintive and so mundane. She'd just been hit too hard. In these days of miracle medicine, it's so hard to reckon with the idea that death can't, at least, be forestalled. People talk about the blessing of things being quick and painless, which, of course, we have no idea is really true. The person has entered a world which is byzantine, and like some monestary run by an ancient order, untresspassable.

The stoic insanity of it has been my excuse for partially not believing in it. People disappear in my life, but they don't usually REALLY evaporate, flatten...go. I've found people on Facebook I haven't seen in twenty years. There are a million Karen Hunters, and one of them is even a gay priest who has written a book about being married. God loves to tease me.

I can less and less call out her name and expect an answer that doesn't come from inside me, however that may be. It's time to get all of the photographs developed to the sizes she wanted and to finish what I know needs to be done. All of this will take a while and each one will push me further behind the firmament--these are part of my gallery, like every work of literature or art worth reading, they depict the strongest yearnings of a beautiful soul.

There is something evil-feeling in being the one left with the artist's estate. The danger is to become too much a curator. I'm not sure what I mean, but I don't want to become one of those people who sees the weaknesses of works....stop. I've spent my life being that kind of person. To indulge in an artistic act I believe to be beautiful and to commit to it without reservation is beyond me or has been except for when I was with Karen. Flying is that kind of an act. Listening and selecting music is another. Being with someone in the music, another. Fact is, I've never done anything beautiful alone, and usually I am the "voice of reason," who wonders if the metaphors are enough.

Perhaps I can think explain it best by saying I start to feel further away from the sky.