Dead but not Absent

A friend is helping me “re-home” many belongings as I dramatically downsize the physical accouterments of my life in preparation for taking up residence in the new tiny monastery the bank and I jointly own. 

Among them is the first real bed my beloved and I purchased over 40 years ago.

At that time, it was part of another family’s household sale in the wake of their elders’ demise.  For most of its life with us it has adorned one guest room or another.  My friend emails that, upon seeing the snapshot I provided, “a darling young couple,” creating their first home, are “smitten with the bed,” and I should decide how much I want for it. 

No small request, I’m aware, as I feel the universe roll out the kind of big questions that underlie most, maybe all, considerations:

Who will I be or die trying?

How do I part with this bed in the spirit of my beloved?

What approach will best serve the darling young couple 

for their entire lives perhaps?

I tune in to the love of my life, dead 14 months, but not absent.

I email my friend:

Let’s give them the gift 

of having to determine themselves 

what the bed is worth to them,

the amount being a symbol of its place in their lives.  

Then,

they take that amount 

and give it to a social cause

that is especially important to them, 

one that represents the values

they aspire to honor 

in their relationship with one another.

Fourteen months.  That’s how long I’ve experienced the explosion of my heart that I anticipate, and hope, will never end.  One that continually reveals how my every sense of what’s what is, at best, incomplete.  

There’s no getting life back in order.  That Elvis has left the building.  More relevant, the longing for such a thing is a form of death––the opposite of discovering ever-newly the infinite faces of love––including heartbreak, and stepping into the unknown.  Everyday.

This gift is the natural manifestation of the fire for God I was born with.  Saint and cowboy I’ve been working on long before this incarnation, without even knowing it most of the time.

The love of my life and so many of the relationships that came with her (people, places, stuff) is dramatically torn from me.  I almost wrote “violently,” but not meaning violent with anger, meaning with absolute irrevocability.  

Reclaiming a dust mote of my life before Dear’s suicide, of getting over or beyond the endless expansion her death offers––is not only impossible; my heart would shrivel at the attempt.

“Go big or stay home,” was among her favorite mottos.

My beloved, and all that her life and death has instigated, is nothing more, or less, than the exquisitely loving support of the Divine in service of my soul’s destiny.

To steal from Rumi:

Love’s secret 

is always lifting its head out

from under the covers,

“Here I am!”