Picking at the salty remains of roast beef…

Shortly before the November election, I’d heard word of a friend’s illness, and I determined to fly West and see this couple. At that time, I thought I was poisoned by mold and struggling myself, but I really wanted to visit. I decided to hold off buying the ticket for a few days until just after the election, because, well, what if? What if the grid crashed or something? I’ve lost money on airline tickets before.

What happened, instead, is I ended up in the ER the night before the election and discovered the mold was a red herring. I had cancer — although I hold, yet, that the mold was an element of a complicated equation that may, or may not, have added to turning on that cancer gene. By then, flying was impossible for me. Now, news comes to me of her final passage from this life. My friend has lived a long, loving — a good, very good — life, and yet…

All afternoon, another friend and I text back and forth. Remember the nights we ate in their dining room where the walls were painted light blue above a cream headboard? On the wall thermometer, we watched the January temps dip to 20, 21, 25 below zero, laughing at what would be a cold drive home. We never wanted to leave early. Instead, we kept drinking wine, eating chocolate cake, picking at the salty remains of roast beef.

Sorrowful, indeed. We are all now far enough along in life to know that no one dodges the Reaper, that the cut of illness or injury might fall swiftly at any moment. That, in the end, we leave as we entered. While my daughter drove me home the other twilight, I watched the stars ignite in the burnished blue along the horizon, one by one, these ancient untouchable illuminations. She followed the highway home; my eyes fastened on those seed pearls, the slender thread that thickened just the merest width as the night flushed in.

Here’s a line from Niall Williams that, by stroke of coincidence, I read today.

“… you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.”