Collecting

by | Jun 18, 2011 | 0 comments

So many things to tell you- so much I’m collecting.  I keep collecting, but not the way I did in the past when I waited to share the details of my day with you over dinner in the evening…I realize I can’t hold this much, this many days, months, and years, and all they contain in my head or even in words anymore.  But still, I hold them.  Collect them.  Somewhere inside.

The other day I realize that in our Netflix queue is a record of all of the movies we watched over the last few years- complete with all of your ratings- 390 of them.  Audrey can see that you gave The Host and The Machinist five stars…that you gave Happy Gilmore and Slumdog Millionaire four.  It is nice that I have this record since I usually forget all of the movies we’ve seen and needed to ask you whether I’d seen something or else I might watch it again by accident, only thinking half way through that it seemed familiar.

Last night I write a song in tears- but at first I hear it in my head but can’t find the right chords on my guitar.  I am still so used to just singing it for you and having you tell me what I’m looking for.  Instead I struggle along and curse until I find them.  Then I sing, “What can I do with this love?”

A E F#m.

I’m heading straight down the aisle toward your coffin again- straight through Father’s Day with no father for my child, straight through the day that the world changed for me- the sky looked enormous and floating and overwhelming.  I’m numb I think because I don’t stop doing things, keeping busy, and feel as if I’m preparing for an anti-wedding, the last minute details- the stress underneath all of the phone calls and trips to the florist and caterer.

I watched a documentary on death and mortality last weekend.  It was mostly based on Ernest Becker’s book, “The Denial of Death.”  Fairly convincing…that basically all that we do- our culture, our religions, our patriotism and politics- are just a means of denying our future demise.  In it, one of the sociologists refers to us as “meaning hungry creatures.”

JAC

June 18, 2011

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