Across the Rainbow

Where all my goals turn to ash,
where my throat is held up
  by the knives of your passing,
where my arms are emptied
  of your precious burden,
and where my feet drag
  to avoid walking past
  all the trails we forged
  that now echo with your loss.
-TMYC (2014)

RIP Kyra
January 26, 1998 – September 7, 2014

Even almost 17 years was not long enough to share her world. It was a shockingly fast, strangely peaceful, entirely unexpected, unearthly, and dislocating experience.

While Auden’s eulogy (made contemporaneously famous in Four Weddings & A Funeral) is where my heart is today:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: ‘I was wrong’

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-WH Auden

At the same time… My experience and soul tell me there is more, so Mary Frye’s words are a more appropriate memorial:

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!

-Mary Frye (1932)

Despite the tragedy, I still have to finish schoolwork, I still have to go to the office, I still have to take care of Natasha, and I still have to breathe, so you’ll forgive me if my goal this week is just to stop the leaky eyes and quit the headache from too heavy grief. We’ll see whether next week brings any emotional improvement. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit my ROW80 cohorts to see how they’re doing.