The cursed day has passed and the cursed night as well. The 1095th day. This is how we count, compress our lives as we spin and spin in our slow swing around the sun. We count our sorrows and the days and nights that hold them. we count our breaths and our heartbeats. We count the hours of sleep and of wakefulness and in the morning we count the birds at the feeder; how many finches, how many sparrows? This year we count the drops of water coming from the tap. One minute running equals 1 gallon. You see how much I want to tell you? How insignificant it would all seem to you now.
When Grandma Diddie was alive she wrote letters to everyone she loved. She taught her sons to do the same and so I have letters from my Dad as well. They were long letters--3 to 4 pages front and back, her writing tiny and cramped, dad's elegant---describing the details of the day or week, nothing beyond. I used to wonder how it was that I continued to look forward to these letters that contained nothing but the minutea of daily activities with sentences like, "hung the clothes out and got them in before the storm" or "took the car in today. Saw Dave and got caught up about the kids". But I understand now because in your absence I want to send you these letters, too. To not share our days, the smallness of them, the profound intimacy of all they contain, is such a constant grief. I want to tell you about the weather, how the hours of the day were spent, all the earthly minutes, busy or idle, these simple acts of living strung together on the sturdy backs of the hours that line up to receive them like patient burros. We load them on minute, by minute, with phone calls and cooking, wiping down the counters, scraping plates and weeding the garden, licking envelopes or stopping to deadhead the rose bush on the way to the car. On the way to work I notice the progress of the work on the highway, new graffitti, the eucalyptus trees at the overpass that look stressed and brittle in the drought. My thoughts race ahead of me: what to prepare when I get to school, who has completed the project and who likely never will , the juggling of all those needs and the warm embrace of the children. But my mind is also in the past, the past that is always present, the night that you were torn from my life like a page torn from a book. My tear ducts are seemingly tied to the ignition of my car now. Turn the key, the tears start to flow. Sacred private space. My little metal bubble is a private world, in transit. So often, with my head full of what was left undone behind me and what awaits my attention ahead of me, the ache of your absence brings me back to the present, erasing all time except this moment. Everything erased except this one primal scream and no matter how I try to stop these words from forming I repeat the useless question against my will: why, Caleb, why?
