On April 5th of this year, I responded to an innocuous post I saw on Facebook, the social networking site. I learned that my friend had died that very day. That news stopped my National Poetry Month tradition of posting a poem each day of April. On June 14th, I sat in the bar Jim Covington co-owned with Nancy Liese, his long-time love and companion. Nancy walked into the bar and startled to a stop when she saw me. She opened her arms and as I held her to me, she snuffled into my chest. “I knew that I would cry when I saw you.”
“I knew that I would cry when I saw you, too,” I told her. And we did.
“April is a bad month for me,” I later told Nancy, a thought reminiscent of lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland.” April 20th was the one-year anniversary of the death of a good friend, a man I met when he married another friend named Nancy. Two women named Nancy, both my friends, two loves lost. I’ll long remember the events of the month of April.
The country is preparing to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, an event more commonly known to us as “The Fourth of July.” There may be some political events and speeches, but for the most part, our activities will involve parades, picnics, fairs and fireworks. We will commemorate the best barbecue, the prize pig, the greatest nighttime lightshow, but we will not long remember any of those things. But 1776 was 237 years ago; more recent history — a mere 150 years — had Abraham Lincoln saying that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” in what came to be called “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”
One hundred fifty years ago, from July 1st to July 3rd, 163,000 human beings collided on a field of battle in Gettysburg, Penn.; 51,000 of them were lost to life, lost to health or simply, lost. Some of us will acknowledge that battle, those losses, and some others will look at the sky and wonder how the fire was made to color the canopy of the night. And neither 1776 nor 1863 will keep us from our appointed barbecues.
The fabric of our days is woven with threads rough and fine, textured with the quality of our experience. When we run our hands over the surface of our lives we will feel the knots of pain and loss. I snagged on April, became entangled in June. In the early morning hours of June 2nd, 2009, a good friend — a man who was as a son to Nancy Liese — was murdered at his place of employment; on June 6th of the following year, my mother sighed and died.
Let us laugh and play in the delight of the coming holiday, and hold the ones we love and call the ones we can and develop the remembrances that will color the fabric of our days. Our ability to do so came at a great cost to many, and while it is not healthy for us to dwell on the dead, we do no harm to our souls to remember with reverence.
Nancy and Bill, Nancy and Jim, Michael Patrick and my mother, Izetta Geraldine Woods: six lives lived and loved and three who were lost. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, I can never forget what they did for me; I remember with reverence the laughter of each, and smile into the silk of my day.