Missing

Creative Strategy #22: Grief is an essential experience

Photo by Artem Balashevsky on Unsplash

My oldest friend & I in our backyard

one sunny summer. Me sipping ice tea.

He removing his watch & wallet

to sit on a patio chair, relaxing

He palms his thinning wave back.

Fellow seminarians. I ask him about death.

He says & gestures gracefully with his hands,

Look, the dandelions come back every year.

"Those are different flowers, Jim," I say.

His mind hadn't quite left him.

But I watched it in denial.

Watched my friend's body disappear

starting with his memories (like me),

names, words, until he ended up

saying, "Fill in the blanks."

I didn't really become alarmed

until the last time I drove with him.

He would talk and swerve into the next lane.

I drove us then.

Such a sweet judgmental man.

I loved having dinner out

with him until he couldn't read the menus,

or remember what he liked to eat.

And how I tried to help him

when he no longer grasped

the intricacies of a fingerprint id.

Here's the thing.

I don't want this to be a sad poem

just because I am sad about it.

Even when he lost my name

he still knew I played guitar.

He loved me.

Well, he loved everyone.

His memory warms me.

He was a beautiful beautiful man.

There was no one like him. No one.

In another poem which I can't write now

you'll see him shining with promise,

a charming handsome blonde boy

plucked from the suburbs

with a wavy shock of hair.

You'll applaud his passion for justice,

his real faith in people,

his deep deep courtesy,

his explosive laugh.

He accepted everyone where they were at.

I have rarely seen in my 71 years

that.

Fill in the blanks.

Patrick O’leary