A Eulogy
Someone I Loved
Dearly
A ferocious survivor that I was so proud of died, and I didn’t realize it was happening, when it was. It was one of those long running illnesses you never recover from, but can go unseen until it is too late to treat somehow anyway. It started with the birth of children because this change obviously changed the ability for her to carry on and be the priority. But it was obviously just a set back. Children are not children forever.
Let me be obtuse. This woman was successful with so much potential to go further. She could write and politic any room. She was naturally a leader and likeable at the same time. She was beautiful and creative. She had great dreams for herself. She could squeeze money from them so she could work and garden nearly at the same time. She could work and nurse a baby. She could work and travel to a small town in France. In the mountains where she had previews delivered by FedEx.
She could throw a party! She could make Thanksgiving for 12. She could plant 50 trees. She could hand-paint stairs with fishes swimming up stream because this was her, a self-portrait of sorts. She could read Tarot cards and open stranger’s hearts to themselves. She wrote screenplays through all of this with the hope, always the hope that this one would make it through.
She’s been dead a long time. The last screenplay she wrote was 18 years ago. That’s a way to know the first death knell.
There have been gasps for life, still, along the way. However, big working and financial success may have quickly followed with a bell ringing. Oh she did over work, but she made no money. Her gardens shrank to several potted plants and she reminisced so much about the time when she was more alive in the past huge garden, than on her balcony with a successful cayenne pepper plan growing in spite of her dying. Relationships that were once so easy, so simply attached to her life were dead or barely breathing. Music was quieted. Laughter evaporated. Dancing was finished.
In memory of this woman what can be held? She is ashes without ashes. What can be said that doesn’t turn into nostalgia but accepts that there is no more energy within to live the dreams of her?
Accepting the woman who was still striving to survive has not survived into life now. There is nothing but mourning for her today. Her loss is like a cold front in summer. It is shocking to find out what has been perhaps obvious to others. The reality has come upon me like an electric shock to begin living knowing her dead. I so did not want her to die that I ignored it, not allowing myself to live.
It will be an experiment then to live without her. It is grievously hard. The only thing I know to do without her is to get to know what parts of me are breathing. I can say now that I can write a poem and some of them make some sense. I don’t know if this sort of eulogy for my former self makes any sense. I wanted to honor some of her incredibly self-powerful, self-created l, and graceful or funny ease through life.
