Texts for Translation 2008:
  Rebecca Jan Lane

 On Grieving

Rebecca Jan Lane

  Picasso’s Blue Period was supposedly triggered by his trip through Spain, after his friend Carlos Casagemas committed suicide, although no one knows for sure.  In the painting The Old Guitarist, the withered man, bathed in blues, sits twisted around his instrument, cradling it like a lover.  But even more interesting is what is not seen with the painting.  Above the old man and the guitar, beneath the layers of paint, if you look closely enough there’s another face, a portrait of a woman that Picasso started before and painted over to do the guitarist.  Just another example of how grief overwhelms everything we do, stops us in our tracks, how it haunts us. 

            When I had two deaths in six weeks, when I thought I’d never be able to stand again.  But still the entire time, I was surrounded by those who had just died.  They were thick as fog, and just as vaporous.  The moment I thought I’d caught one in my sight, they vanished into the sunshine, or into shadows, and left me to grasp at cobwebs and clouds.
The first was my classmate Matthew who adored Milton and Chaucer.   We spent weekends in the library debating, and reveling in literature.   He took a turn too fast around the lake and drove his little silver Mazda into a wall.  The paint slivers from his car lay scattered in the road, having erupted with the impact.   The university held a candlelight vigil to remember Matthew.  I read one of his favorite excerpts from Paradise Lost that night, choking on every single word. 
Then it was my friend and mentor Liza who died suddenly of a heart attack while talking on the phone to a business associate.  Her toy poodle was found licking Liza’s ear, supposedly in an effort to wake her, the same way the pup had roused her owner a hundred times before.   The puppy went to live with a co-worker, and somehow the store stayed open, even though Liza was two thirds of the reason anyone went in.  If you couldn’t find a gift for someone, she’d be able to find something in her store, wrap it in fluorescent pink paper, and you were guaranteed a delighted response.  She was that kind of person.  She was also the kind of person who gave a woman with breast cancer a silk/cashmere scarf and garnet earrings to remind her that she was beautiful, hair or not.  

Liza’s viewing backed up traffic in town for blocks and blocks.  The funeral home’s parking lot was filled beyond capacity.  If there had been a valet service, or a shuttle service that night they would have made a million easy.  I parked a few streets over, in front of an ancient Victorian house that had been neglected for at least ten years.  The grass was cut and the bushes pruned into what I could only guess were dismal  attempts at topiary. The cream trim along the porch was peeling up and revealed that it had once been a deep green. The butchered hedges hid the paint well enough.  From behind the stained glass windows, a light flickered inside, and I could hear someone teasing a squirming pitched piano out of its silence.  

To say the place was packed would be too colloquial, too easy.  To telling, less showing.  You may not believe me when I say that I stood in line to make the pass by the casket and give my respects, for over an hour, moving a few steps every ten or fifteen minutes.  Sugary sweet rose air freshener puffed out, whirred out, simmered, whatever it was that it did, I never could see. We just smelled it, like an old rose garden near a candy cane factory on a windy day.  If it’d had a color it would have been pink.  Cotton candy, write to your best girlfriend, first lipstick pink.

            There were hints of color, almost imperceptible at first.  Light beiges, creams, paler than baby’s blush pinks.  Each room that we snaked through on our way to the casket gave the feeling of being tightly controlled.  The sofas and chairs weren’t too worn in or comfortable.  They seemed to say, “Sit here, but only if you have to.”  Under the chairs were the clear plastic linings that usually covered them when the guests had gone.  On each side table were small speakers that quietly hummed out hymns, or mood appropriate music.  No ragtime here, though Liza would have laughed at the nerve. 

It is amazing the people you see at a funeral. It’s one of those given things.  People buy new clothes for weddings, proms and funerals.  No matter how much you may have argued with the deceased, you go to the funeral.  It’s one of the unforgivable sins,  snubbing the dead.  Their memories are longer than ours.  You may need them on the other side; after all it may be nothing more than finally transferring from the junior high to the high school, and where all you need is that one kid there to say, “They’re cool,” and you’re in, you’re accepted.  It may be like that.  And if it is, and you snubbed someone’s funeral, you may be in for an eternity of ostracization and eating at the loser’s lunch table.  No one wants that for infinity.

An hour and a half later, after having shuffled quietly through the line, making polite conversation with those around me, and waiting while each person knelt and said the rosary at the head of her casket, I kissed the smooth polished wood, and whispered my goodbye to her.  It took less than thirty seconds, for the tribute.  But like a child who waited for the new ride at Disney World, it was worth it.  Not because of any heart pounding thrills or screams.  But because of the duty involved, the need to say goodbye, to see her off.  If we’d been Vikings, we’d have pushed her out on a boat and set it on fire with all the gold she had acquired, and it would have been no less fitting.  Even then my very purpose there would be small, to swell a crowd, to give silent support, and tender my approbation of the proceedings.

            It was dark by the time I got to the car.  The first hints of summer were coming.  The lilacs bloomed, as pink and white dogwood petals flitted to the sidewalk. I pulled my thin velvet shawl loosely around my shoulder while the cool air flirted with my collarbones, and teased down between my breasts, cooling my heart, too raw from hurt and sorrow.

I still hear their voices somedays.  Liza will come to me in the car and listen carefully when I desperately need to talk. She walks into my mind’s eye holding a cup of coffee and a plate with two éclairs from the bakery down the street.  She wouldn’t close up the store on those days, but we’d go back into the back room, where in May she’d already be unpacking the Christmas items, and the boxes of different items lay in a not quite organized mess, but not chaotic enough to bring out the OCD in her employees. I look into the rear view mirror, so certain to see her face, her smile or her thick glasses.  I almost can catch a whiff of the coffee.  But she is never there and the cup is from Sheetz, two days ago, and is still empty. 
Matthew shows up around the library or the study, when I find a passage of Milton that we both loved especially.  Or when someone brings up Shakespeare, I can hear his exasperated sigh.  Occasionally I’ll find a book out of place in the house, something he would have wanted to read.  I usually find it in the other room next to a small lamp, one I haven’t used in ages, the lamp still on.  I can still smell his cologne.

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