Knowing Andy

Catullus writes in 54 B.C.:

“…da mi bania mille deinde centum…”

“Come let amorous kisses dwell

On our lips, begin and tell

A Hundred and a Thousand more.” Richard Crashaw

We are surrounded by the spirits of all the people whom we have loved for so long.

We think about them every day and long to see them just one more time. At times when I work in the garden and a sudden breeze arises, a butterfly gently touches my hair; it is a breath of loving mystery.

I remember when my heart broke. I could hear it. The sound like the snapping of a bean, fresh from the garden, in readiness for consumption, or to be stowed away for winter. “Snap!” it said. I could feel it slide into a hollow, simultaneously the blood draining from my face. This physical reaction was in response to, “Mom, dad is gone!”

This physical part gave message to the emotion, that for now, or ever more this broken heart will remain in the hollow. For whatever we had been in our life of relationship, it was my life, which was mine to love and nourish, like the garden where the beans grew.

Because it was not suppose to happen this way. It was I who was to relay the message to the children when you would have been very old, when I could have been the source of solace. My tasks now rarely require my full attention, allowing memories to remain in the past. This sense of dislocation, losing my heart to the hollow, has not found its passage back to a full life.

Sometimes on quiet evenings when I have fallen asleep on the couch, drifting in and out of dreams, I can see you there by the sliding glass door, hands cupped on the side of your eyes to deflect the glare, checking to see if I am okay. I’m choked with longing, but I know immediately that you are not for real and that you belong to the mystery.

“Thus at last when we have numbered many a Thousand

We’ll confound the reckoning quite

And love ourselves in wild delight…” Richard Crashaw