Grief is a Curved Horizon

Sunset on The Bay, oil on cradled wood panel, 10″ x 10,” 2023 by Julianna Paradisi

David’s mother passed away peacefully in her home last year. She was my good friend. We shared much in common: a love of nature, gardening, and art. Both of us adored David. I am positive that if I had never met David, I would still have met her: at a museum or lecture, a theater performance or Powell’s bookstore. Perhaps in New Mexico at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum.

Standing in her house’s yard I watch patches of sunlight play teasingly upon the ocean. Beyond it, the horizon curves, beckoning sailors to test its edge.

 It’s early spring, and this sun break is brief-more rain will come. The sun shines, the rain falls. That’s how it has always been.

As I walk through the garden encircling the house pea gravel crunches beneath my feet. I walk this path every time I visit.

In syncopation, my back and right knee crackle and pop from stiffness. The lack of sleep last night obscures my thoughts like clouds floating past the sun.

A tiny grey and beige feather with a single black dot lies on the gravel. I pick it up, holding it gently between two fingertips. It’s soft and delicate. I smile. It belonged to a Northern Flicker, but it’s mine now. I put it in my pocket.

From a neighbor’s deck a wind chime melodically tinkles. In another home, a dog barks. 

Crunch, crunch the gravel goes. I inhale the scent of salt floating on a breeze coming in from the ocean.

A Spotted Towhee calls scoldingly before darting for cover beneath a large rhododendron as I pass. Its mate, unseen, calls back from the hedge.

I’ve visited this house often, for over more than twenty years. Stopping to gaze again at the familiar ocean view, I prepare myself to say good-bye to it.

She’s gone, the owner of this house, the woman who planted the rhododendrons, and tended them. She landscaped this yard without disturbing the existing native plants. She knew each of them by name.

Long before I took up birding, she taught me about the Spotted Towhees and Northern Flickers. The first of each species I’d ever seen were on this property.

She loved this house, and this yard, but she is no longer here.

I also love this house, and yard, but I loved her more. 

We kept her here, in this house she loved, until her body set her free.

That last night, I sat at her bedside, tending to her until the end. My hand on her damp brow as she took her last breath. Her son, my husband, holding her hand. Sea lions barked from the harbor. In the moment of release, I glimpsed the beautiful child she once was.

She had waited for this moment. She had talked about it, comforting us beforehand.

I allow the tears to flow freely. I let myself feel the weight of my grief. I won’t dull or numb its soft ache in my belly. 

Years ago, I was a nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit. The deaths of infants and children were tragic, and Hemingway’s words,

“When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.” *

However, after transitioning into adult nursing, I learned that the deaths of the elderly, if not tragic, are equally sad. There is no difference. The rains of grief fall just as cold and kill everything.

Love is love.

There’s no way out of it, this grief that comes with loss. It can be numbed with substances, by throwing oneself into work, or running across the country back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth again until you exhaust yourself like Forest Gump. The grief never goes away, you just learn to live with it in your heart. With luck, it doesn’t destroy you, but instead knits you closer to the human race through compassion. All love stories are doomed to eventually end. That’s all I have to say about that.

I will learn to live with this grief. It is a curved horizon I wish to cross and find I haven’t fallen off its edge after all, but will continue sailing forward, perhaps discovering something new.

* A Movable Feast