Monday Morning Musing: New Truths

For the past month, the majority of my writing has been posted to Caring Bridge.  There was, I believe, exactly one Substack post in what was the worst thing I’ve ever endured. 

We are only days into this new and most unwelcome version of reality.  The one where Bruce has died and we are left wondering how in the name of everything that we hold to be true and good we will move forward.  I recognize that I’m writing in the plural – speaking, maybe, for our children and grandchildren.  It also feels safer to write in the plural, less alone. 

After a couple of days at home, all of us gathered at Robby and Haley’s house for almost a week – to mourn and remember and laugh and cry.  To bake and cook and go to the water’s edge.  To hold and play with babies who remind us better than anyone that life moves forward.  Geradeaus. 

I went to worship yesterday – I needed the words of the liturgy and of Scripture to do the same thing that babies do.  I found a place where I was unknown, so that my grief didn’t need to announce my arrival.  Thank you, people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gig Harbor.

And I have returned home and am tending to the details of all that is still to come:  the Memorial Service, the legalities, the sorting through.  (Some of you have asked about a mailing address.  It is 415 Maple Park Ave. SE. Olympia, WA. 98501.)

I have found comfort to be fleeting, but present.  Lurking around the edges. 

There were two things said that strike me as very true.  One: that Bruce would not have left me if he’d had any other choice.  (Thank you, John Keel).  And two: that we all thought that he would live to be very old – in his nineties or even 100 and he would die in bed, still talking and still telling us “Bruce Stories”.  Yes, Robby, that would have felt correct and in order.

But that is not the truth we have, even if it is the truth we long for.  The truth we have is that in a brave, brutal battle, Bruce’s physical body could not continue to sustain his spirit.  And so it is that spirit that I imagine being welcomed into what’s next by his mother and father, some friends, and oh, his grandmother.  I hope my grandparents greeted him too; he’d only met one of them.  And our Pancho, who must have surely been barking his little head off in greeting as he welcomed Bruce to the next big adventure.

It is said that for those who have died, time compresses into nothing and everything.  That by the time we join them, it will be as though they’ve just left.  Or, as it’s described elsewhere, in the twinkling of an eye.  I find some solace in that.  Even as I know that for us, the hard work of grieving requires time in the way we know it here.

I don’t know how long my writing will continue to reflect and process through this loss.  But for this day, this is where I sit.  Thank you for reading along and if the content is too heavy, I understand. 

I close today with words written by the late Brian Doyle, who also died far too soon, but who for decades wrote so beautifully about those things that make us human. 

“This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else.  You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw.”

Bruce always walked toward love.  Always.  Even at the end.