the last burnt sienna crayon

I found out this morning that my friend’s dad died.

When did my father die? I can’t remember anymore. Was it the 3rd or the 9th of October? I remember the year, at least, 1997. Twelve years ago, not quite 2 months after my wedding, which he couldn’t attend.

It’s all a blur. The wedding, the new house and the landlord’s cat, dad’s death, visas, immigration, the funeral and the three months living with my mother, sister and husband all together afterwards, the unemployment, the lost university course, the relapses, the wheelchair, the steroids and anti-depressants, the generous gift from an anonymous stranger so I could get afford my visa and return to my new home. It all seems so distant and like it happened to somebody else. And the strongest memory of the day that he died is is not of the phone call but of our friends M and J buying us fish and chips so we didn’t have to cook.

I think he had already died to me, when his brain became too damaged to know anyone, remember or understand anything. He wouldn’t have known if I had managed to fly back before he died. I tried, but I didn’t make it. And he wouldn’t have known. The last time I had seen him was at the airport nearly a year before when I had to turn my back and walk away from him, wondering if that was the last time. I hardly knew how soon.

I walked myself down the aisle when I married. He wasn’t there, he was too ill, though I barely knew how ill. I had always said that it was either both my parents or me alone. So as it was, it was me alone, sobbing to Pachelbel’s Canon, part because at that stage of my new illness I was overwhelmed to be walking at all, and part because of an immigrant’s overwhelming experience of the simultaneous experiences of the joy of marital gain and the grief of homeland loss. And I knew he would die. . . though not so quickly. I knew I was leaving and losing everybody for good. . . though not that it would become so irreversible and sealed by so many deaths and changes. So I sobbed the whole way, clumsily knocking pew ends off with my massive bouquet of sunflowers.

I never really held the anniversary of his death, and so I don’t remember the date. I’m sure it was early October. I have a feeling he died on the 3rd and the funeral was the 9th. The time that reminds me of his death every year is not October, but actually in June when all of the shops start advertising for Father’s Day. People in the country where I now live scoff at the holiday as a fake capitalist construct by Hallmark, but it meant something to my dad. It took me many years to pass a shop in early June and stop thinking “Oh, I need to get a card for dad. Oh, I can’t.”

He just missed his 80th birthday, and his 25th wedding anniversary with my mom. That was 12 years ago, so that means that this month, had he lived, he would have been 92. wow. His birthday was at the end of October, either on Halloween or the day before, I never remembered. I just knew how much he hated Halloween. Not because of his birthday or for any principle or religious reason. . . it was just one of the many things in life that annoyed him.

Like the NASDAQ. He just hated the sound of it. He was obsessed with the news, but complained each and every time he heard a financial report, because he hated the pronunciation and the sound of the NASDAQ. Which I only mention at all to demonstrate that he was a strange man with many quirks. I inherited many of his quirks. I am bound by so many of them. We are so subject to what our parents give us, for good or for ill.

Dad was born in 1917. Which meant I had a somewhat different kind of upbringing for someone born in the mid 70s. The early 20th century in my home country (any country), was a very different world to the one I was born into, and he struggled to parent a child in the late 20th century. He saw so much. His brothers fought in WWII (one died in the Philippines), he was medically discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (or at least I was told once). He was in the army air corps, he ran his own garage, he kept and remodeled classic cars, he drag raced other drivers on the highway, he snored loudly, he was in a country band that played on the radio in the 1930s, he got thrown out of university for walking a girl home and standing on her porch, he was reinstated and became an engineer, he started his own gym/training centre in his 70s, he had been electrocuted so many times that when he tried to teach me to use a compass, the needle would point to him, not north, he would come looking for me at 3 am when I was 18 and out with my boyfriend, telling me to come home, or else, and when that little girl of his came home a few years later from a foreign land and could no longer walk or pick things up or write or see and could not even lie in bed at night for the raw, heavy pain of the sheets on her legs, he stayed up all night and let her cry. So much happened to and around him. I can hardly blame him for the things he got wrong.

I have not been to his grave since the day of his funeral (now that was a strange experience! The service was run jointly between my mother’s Evangelical minister, my sister’s high Anglo-Catholic, gay priest and a an old friend of my father’s, a man who had spent time in jail for militia involvement and tax evasion as he believed the money belonged to God and not Cesar!). My mother has moved on and can’t go back. I wanted to go there when I recently travelled to the homeland, but there was no one to take me, and I never dared ask anyone. There were too many memories to drag anyone through.

Dad didn’t want me to go, but he knew he couldn’t/shouldn’t stop me. And now, just as I never knew my grandfather, my daughter will never know hers. I wonder if he had lived, if I would have stayed here, in my chosenland quite as long.

I wonder what a person is willing to give up for their family. He gave up so much. Family was everything. It was the only thing.

And I still left. Sorry dad.

This morning, the sky outside was completely black with clouds and the rain drove itself hard into my window. Yet, somehow there was yellow sunlight reflecting on the trees in the park. Where does that come from? it seems to happen a lot in this part of the country. black sky, sunlit trees. The dichotomy suits me.

A few months ago now the phone rang. “Ro died yesterday.” it wasn’t a shock, she was 93 and had been poorly for a while. But the familiar sinking feeling that comes along with the death of a friend was inevitable. I guess, when a person dies, sometimes it’s a sinking feeling, and sometimes it’s an implosive collapse. Sinking doesn’t last as long and is more easily recovered from. I’ve experienced both. I am sure it makes no comment on the worth of a life how the living react to their death.

I found out a while ago that TL died. She was 29 and died in a car accident. I didn’t really know her very well, and had never been in touch since school, but had volunteered working in summer camps with her when we were in high school. Again, that sinking feeling. Our lives had brushed against each other enough to have torn something out of me when she was gone from this sphere.

Two and a half years ago, my friend M was killed. he was 23 and had his young life forcibly taken from him while working with displaced children and communities in northern India. We don’t know who we don’t know why and even the mere mention of his first inital will cause so many who read here to recall that implosive collapse so I will say no more.

Oliver Postgate died recently. He will live on in his creations that meant so much to so many children (and adults). Michael Jackson? His body gave up the fight. The list of celebrities stretches on. We didn’t know them. We thought we did, but we didn’t. We thought that they had given something to us, and perhaps they did. Perhaps enough so that we felt the rip of something being gone.

My grandmother died 10 years ago, my father, 12. My aunts and uncles, I’ve lost count of the number and of the years and the ages. I am certain that it makes no comment on the worth of a life to us if we can no longer, nor any longer do we try to, remember the history or the particulars.

Ro went to my church and was a stallwart member of my community. I looked up to her and can not forget her.

In fact, I don’t think I even would have rememberd TL but for a photograph that i have in my albums. But as her image is in my book, I will never forget her.

M was my friend and a friend of my friends. He ate at my table and played my piano. We talked about photography and when I see his face in snapshots from parties, I always feel slapped. That face does not inhabit this earth any longer.

We are not allowed to forget celebrity. It isn’t that we ever knew them, but we did know something of them. They were a part of the jigsaw we have appropriated into our lives and is now missing a piece.

Then most recently there was Ra. Ra was in her early 30s and the mother of three young children, one of whom was newborn. Ra was a part of my life, and now she isn’t. I didn’t often see Ra and now I will never see her again. Only weeks before she died, I was posting baby congratulations onto her photos online. Only weeks before she died I was thinking of her, of her family. Now I think of them for different reasons.

Thinking of Ra reminds me, more than the others, more than I am comfortable with, that someday I too will not inhabit this earth, none of us will. That someday, as I can no longer talk to or see or touch my own father, my daughter will no longer have me.

I wonder about you, dear reader, and whether when I am gone too you will still remember me? Did you know me well, did we speak, do you remember? Have you seen my picture, or something I have created and did either stay with you? Was it discarded or held onto by you? Are my words remembered, or will they die with you too? What will my legacy be, or will it be wasted? What have I done that will touch those who come after? And on the last day of the world, would things have looked at all different if I had never been here, and what does it matter? If a butterfly flaps its wings in the 21st century, will the world look different in mellenia hence?

Am I only flirting with an unobtainable immortality by bringing my life near to anyone else’s, in the fruitless hope that my memory will live when I do not? Is that why I write here, is that why I take my photographs, is that why I allow my life to brush with anybody? And in that meeting am I passing on anything real or true or worth saving? Is that even possible, or will it all disappear and die? It is a mystery too big for me.

Every day a little death in each of us, that’s the way we were created, though we live for so many years not knowing or realising it. Something is torn out of us when we confront it, when too many people are no longer with us to go on pretending that there is any kind of earthly permanance. We clutch onto our photographs hoping in someway that it can put something back that is now gone, we write down our memories hoping for these changes to halt themselves through our rememberance and our stories.

The fragility of life is entrusted to the living, in the words and memories and photographs that remain. Though words will be forgotten and photographs will eventually be turned to ash. At least presently, I know that the butterflies who have flapped their wings in the midst of my own life, have made this world a very different place.

Selfishly, and vainly, I find myself wondering about my own wings and of their ability to imprint a picture on the world, from any angle or any distance.

I’m not homesick. That’s not what this is.

The keener eyed of you will have noticed that I wrote a story last week that I then went on to delete. It wasn’t quite complete and felt a bit too raw to share in such a level of my incomplete description. The problem being that so much of the description lies in the experience, which none of you could ever have had. At least not in exactly the same way, as it’s mine. You didn’t know my family. I’ve put the story back up, but know I may be the only one to undertand it quite.

I get updates from NPR (national public radio) which give me interesting photography stories, high quality news and tips on new music. Yesterday I was sent some links to listen to Moby’s new album. This track struck a chord with me and when I found the video, even more so. The simple line drawn alien conveys more to me about how it feels to be outside of one’s country, one’s culture, and one’s family perhaps more than I could have expressed in writing. Notice that the friends he imagines and draws for himself do not only look like him, but move like him too. He smiles, until they fade away.

I didn’t know a line drawn alien could break my heart.

Difference is good. Difference is important. But understanding is comfortable. And death is so final. I didn’t realise, until recently, that in embracing difference that I would be giving up so much understanding.

I left without realising that I could never go back. And without realising that no one would wait for me to try.

“Put me on the train, send me back to my home
Couldn’t live without you when I tried to roam
Put me by the window, let me see outside
Looking at the places where all my family died”

I stood on the old whitewashed, wooden, wrap around porch with the two squeeky porch swings and the chimes blowing gently in the breeze and felt something well up in my throat. And the ancient general store next door where I used to run my fingers through vats of nails, bolts and washers as a child, as so many generations of children did before me, stood empty with a large “For Sale” sign in the window. The soda fountain, deserted.

The place, the old towering Victorian mansion, I had so often played there as a little girl. Just as I had on the farm accross the river, with the acres of cornfields and rusted, antique machinery, the hummingbird feeder and the stray cats, the dog lead, belonging to collies long dead, lying limp on the gravel.

And the family. The family were always there. The family were always there, and difficult.

The women collecting in the kitchen, to swap gossip, coupons and recipes. The men in the livingroom by the wood fire arguing politics and religion, with a freshly piqued anger that could strip the wood panelling with their curses, determined to win their battles at all costs. When nobody won, the misery of failing health and old age was always a comfortable armchair to retreat to. The children looking for cats and dogs and playing hide and seek in the barn, blissfully unaware of consequences of the battles that were being engaged in in the liiving room. The women pretending that their lives were not engulfed in the wars fought by elderly men and their slightly younger apprentices in these matters, who looked to the faltering wisdom of years to guide them as they clung to their Budweisers and foul mouths for ammunition. The children just accepted and ignored. Until they were older. I left. Most didn’t.

Both places were void of human life on that day that I returned, but the ghosts came in their cavelries to trample the unfaithful heart who had left them so many years before. I never had said good bye. And now there was no one to say good bye to. No one was at home that day, and I stood breathing the memories with dry and silent tears invisible on my cheeks. I held it back, partly for the sake of myself, partly for the sake of the woman who uncomfortably journied with me that day.

I don’t quite know why it overwhelmed me that day, but something happened. Something changed. I think I said good bye.

I had a leaving party before I left on my recent trip. It was kind of a strange thing to do, as I was coming back, and I knew it at the time, but I still felt like I had to do it. I knew that there was a good bye in this trip somewhere, but to feel it so soon, before I had even stepped on a plane, was odd and confusing. It was decisive. It felt as large as the final battle.

I didn’t understand it at the time, and was aware that I was acting strangely to everyone; the party, saying good byes, hugging people, sitting on my own in the park, looking whistfully at the ducks and feeling so sad, like i would never come back. It felt like I was leaving, like the little death that I had to die to come here to begin with. I had a return ticket and my travel plans and knew that realisticly and sensibly, it was rediculous, but still it felt somehow like i was leaving, like what I had done so carelessly before.

I know now that I was just feeling, experiencing, what I was always going there to do, but would not be allowed to express while there. I know now, that I did leave here for the last time, because now I am somehow different.

You see, the first time I left the homeland, I never said good bye. I just got on a plane and left. I never looked back. I convinced myself for practically a generation that it had never exsisted. Now that I’ve been back there and have felt the ghosts, recognised their monuments and paid hommage to their memories, I can no longer deny any part they have in my own history, the part they played in making me.

The soldiers in that war have almost all died. But those places, those battlefields remain. They’re where I came from. And I’ve finally begun to say a propper good bye.

My friend died last Wednesday.

My friend is dead.

And I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. And I’m trying to understand, and I feel a bit like I did 2 and 1/2 years ago when I had another friend who died, and I grieved and I cried and I felt like I had no right to be grieving so, as I was not as close to him as others were, but I did, I grieved, and I felt guilty back then for doing so. Perhaps I didn’t (and don’t now) so much feel guilty for grieving but instead for not having taken the time to know him then or her now better. And now I will never get that chance.

no. . . i feel/felt guilty for grieving so much.

My friend died last week and something hurts, but at the same time keeps reminding me that we were not close, that I rarely saw her, that we never spoke on the phone, or had a heart to heart or even sent Christmas cards. But I keep thinking of her voice and how comforting it was in a crowd of strangers and how I always thought that she had the most beautiful speaking voice of anyone I ever knew and how I will never hear it again. She had often been a comforting presence to me, and how much pain she had just been through, and how unfair.

I dare not think about her husband, her three children, her newborn son. Yet I try, when I can, to pray for them. I try, but, it’s shaken. What good does prayer do? It couldn’t save my friend. It was never meant to save my friend, but we hoped that it could. We all prayed. Those who knew her, those who never knew her but only cared for someone who cared about her or even cared for someone who cared about someone who cared about her. I Corinthians 12:26 says “if one part [of the body, of Christ] suffers, every part suffers with it.”

I don’t think I ever prayed so hard, for two weeks we all prayed. All over the world, we prayed. Why did we pray? My friend is dead.

Now I look at all of my friends. I look at them and try to be normal, I try not to speak of it because perhaps one is not to mention the unmentionable? I try to be normal with my other friends, because most of them never knew of her, and I don’t really want to speak of it, or anything else really, anyway. I look at all of my friends, but wonder if in two weeks they will be dead too? And that hurts. We never expect this to happen. But it does. The last time I saw her, I did not expect it to be the last time I would ever see her. The last time I saw my other friend who has died, I did not think that it would be the last time. Why did I know them, when now it is done? Why do I know anyone? When will be the last time? Was it today?

And what is death anyway? I know what my faith has taught me. But I don’t understand. Perhaps right now, I don’t believe. Perhaps the question is not, ‘what is death?’ but in the end, ‘what is life?’

my friend lies dying in a hospital bed, 3 weeks after giving birth to her 3rd son.

and i’m finding it hard to care about much else.