Obit

That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

When a mother dies,

a house becomes a forest.

Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.

Death isn’t the enemy. Knowledge of death is the enemy.

To suffer for so long with knowledge but not to finish what was known.

Because after a death, there is no moving on despite the people waving us through the broken lights. There is only a stone key that fits into one stone lock. But the dead are holding the key. And the stone is a boulder in a stream. I wave my memories in, beat them with a wooden spoon, just for a moment, to stop the senselessness of time, the merriment, just for a moment to feel the tinsel of death again, its dirty bloody beak.

Time breaks for the living eventually and we can walk out of doors. The handle of time’s door is hot for the dying. What use is a door if you can’t exit? A door that can’t be opened is called a wall.

The way the second person dies when a mother dies, reborn as third person as my mother. The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

It is strange to help someone

grow while helping someone die.

*

When someone dies, there is a constant feeling of wanting to speak to someone, but the plane with all the words is crossing the sky.