Last Friday shortly after noon eastern time, I got the news I was expecting, though no one ever can accurately predict the time of someone’s coming into this life or leaving it. I had lit a candle in my office a couple of days before when I heard that George was coming to the end of his life and had moved into what my native teacher calls “ceremonial time.” Though nearly a continent away, I moved into ceremonial time as well, into that space the Irish call, “the thin time.” Once it’s clear there is no turning back, no recovering and feeling better, there’s work to do to get out of this life, to let go of it. A few minutes after my former husband achieved this, my son called to tell me his father had died. I expressed my sorrow, but also my joy that his work, and his suffering was finished, his life complete.
Lines from a poem by one of my heroines, Maya Angelou, came to me, “When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.” I fell silent. I noticed my breath and how fully and easily I was breathing now. It seemed it was all I wanted to do–to just breathe, and fully appreciate that I still can. As George and I have been divorced over 40 years, nearly four times longer than we were married. Unable to keep the promise of “till death do us part,” there were many promises made that we were unable to keep –in Dr. Angelou’s words, “kind words never said,” “promised walks never taken.”
In these past few weeks, as George was preparing to make his transition my “memory, suddenly sharpened.” Images flashed across the screen of my inner mind, and I have celebrated what comes to me there. Though there were few models of how to do it, we were able to create a good divorce, to co-parent our three children with their stepfather Richard, to vacation together in the short weeks when our nearly grown children were able to be home from school, to take turns together caring for our youngest son Kenneth when he fell ill and died from AIDS, to celebrate the births of our 4 grandchildren, to companion one another as we grieved the death of our eldest daughter Corinne. And through it all– to stay connected in the circle of an extended family for nearly half a century.
A few minutes after I got the call, I realized that George’s death day was also our eldest grandson Ethan’s 31st birthday. In revisiting the poem “When Great Trees Fall” I learned that Maya Angelou shared a birthday and death day with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was assassinated on her birthday. Besides inspiring the poem, his death affected her so deeply she stopped celebrating her own birthday for many years. My hope, for Ethan and the rest of the family, is that that link between Ethan and his grandfather, which will always be there, will ignite loving memories of Papa George; of his love of jazz, his continuous early adoption of technology, his beloved lighthouse on the Oregon coast and the book he wrote about its history, the RV bus he lived in and drove around the country for ten years, and to remember especially, as in the words of Dr. Angelou’s poem,
“They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
