Pussycat, Pussycat Where Have You Been?

A.  to London to visit the queen
B.  burying the dead.

The answer, Dear Reader, is B.  But, not in the way you think.  In the way that I now realize is what is the long long arc of transmuting a living being to a what?  I don't even know what to call a friend now dead -- history?

As I am tired and the hour is late I'll cut and paste from an email that I sent to one who helped me pack:

We got everything out yesterday.  I always like to do a last walkthrough, even if it means opening cabinets that I’m certain were cleared.  Sure enough:  I opened the louvered shutters above Fred’s bedroom closet and there was a comforter and a bag of costumes.  So, now it’s done done.  (Mark and I just got back from the storage facility in Wallingford where we put the last things.)  Even though Fred has been gone for me for some time, I stood in each room and said “Good-bye Fred”.  The rooms were naked, shabby where the in-need-of-fresh-paint walls were exposed, and the usual damage that comes from living in a space – the dents, the stains, the marks – were apparent what with the eye not being distracted by beauty and a person’s idiosyncratic style.  He is gone, the place is someone else’s construction site now. Stripped of almost everything that made it unique to Fred.

While I understand some of the Inner Circle’s aversion to being in the space to defenestrate it, I don’t forgive them.  The work of breaking down a person’s physical space isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t bring positive attention, and it’s not about one’s soulful feelings.  It is the quotidian scutwork of life, something I’m far too proficient at doing, and I am hardwired to be thorough in my honor.  At least to this complex and eminently lovable man.

So, the page turns; a new phase begins.

The membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead has always been a fascination of mine; even as a young girl reading Orpheus and Eurydice I realized that the story was a seminal primer in the mysteries of life and death.  I wrote The Negros Burial Ground as the story of a particularly painful passage to what we Westerners who still profess some allegiance to Christian dogma call the afterlife; the journeys of Eleanor Bumpurs, Eddie Perry and Michael Griffin, African-American New Yorkers murdered by agents of the state. The afterlife is complex in African cosmology and hard to describe in a few words, but suffice it to say that there is always a price to pay for trying to live in both worlds simultaneously, and that price is always paid in grief.

When you pack up a lifetime you exist uncomfortably in two worlds.  Yet each artifact removed, discarded and boxed is an admonition:  he is not here.  Some of those artifacts have new homes, new owners, new uses, and he is not here.  And so the furniture is put on the truck.  He is not here.  The boxes leave.  He is not here.  The clothes, the shoes, the music, the art and the tchotchkes.  Not here or here or there.

But where? I ask, postmodern Christian that I am.  (One who aspired to live by the New Testament, but ignores the Old and can't square the circle of Christ's resurrection.)  I don't know.  That is a country I have yet to visit, although love has already bought me a ticket.