Unimaginable Life

There is always room for the unimaginable.

As I am walking the shore of the tempestuous Atlantic this foggy morning, a howling wail comes crescendoing down over the dunes.

The wail is primitive, formidable, immobilizing.

A woman cries out in a strangled voice:

: “Where are you? “

Immediately followed by:

“Can’t you please help me?”

The questions seem harrowing and laced with intense privacy.

The intonation of her voice is chilling, and I immediately begin running away from the disembodied voice. To remain would be treacherous; it would be cutting things too close to the bone for me.

After walking a few blocks out of the gated beach area, my conscience kicks in- I am stunned at my actions: Did I really run away from a woman who may have been in some kind of danger? Did I reject helping a stranger? How could I leave her unattended?

I gather myself from my emotional stupor and run back to the beach,

As I reach the dunes, the fog has lifted, and I can see the wide expanse of the beach below and it is empty.

Starkly bare.

How can that be?

No one walked past me. There are no other set of footprints on the shore besides the ones I left a few minutes ago.

. I head over to the bathrooms and yell out:” Is anyone there? Can I help you?”

But the rest area is locked at this early morning hour.

There is no one here.

At least I tried.

As I continue my walk home, I abruptly trip and fall face first onto the pavement, splaying my arms and legs as I go down. As I get up, I look around to make sure no one has witnessed this graceless fall. But no one is here, I already knew that.

I look down to see what it was I tripped over and discover I have tripped over nothing. The air itself is reason enough for me to trip these past few months.

Emptiness folds itself around me,

I am wandering around in this half-sequestered state since David died. The man who took huge bites out of life has died and left me broken.

My life has been forfeited by unrelenting agony.

A clutch of black emotions cloud my days.

I follow the trajectory of a lone seagull as he flies overhead. He is heading for the harbor for breakfast.

He screeches out a piercing “ keow, keow” as he dives headfirst into the bay.

The majesty of the bird itself reminds me of David reciting, verbatim” The Windhover” on one of our first dates over thirty years ago-his sonorous voice filled with passion and lust.

“My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”

I am cognizant that everything reminds me of David lately: a blade of grass, a traffic light changing from red to green, a burnt piece of toast, beach towels flapping in the wind, opening the window by his empty recliner, index cards, eye drops, half-filled laundry baskets, boring refrigerator contents, his sunglasses on the front seat of the car- ARRGHH….

Tthinking this, causes me to stop in my tracks.

It took a few seconds to realize that I was utterly and completely lost.

David is dead.

He is not going to be at the kitchen table reading “The New York Times” when I open the front door to our home.

He is not going to be there to shoot out his usual litany of questions about what I encountered on my morning walk.

He is not going to buoy me up with his love, his intellect or his compassion.

He is gone.

When I finally open the door to our home, I recall his words to me a few summers agon, as we sat dripping wet on our striped, Red Sox beach blanket, enjoying the warmth of the sun on our bare skin:

“ Mavourneen, we are all going to die. This playing at life is going to end for each one of us. Eventually we are all going to be dragged off into darkness by the butcher called Death.”

This memory causes me to collapse into David’s recliner.

I am going to pass out.

What else did he say??

I close my eyes, and it comes to me- the rest of his words:

“The mystical elements of life; the being unto death ness for Heidegger; the realization that, as Emerson says, the quotidian has to be imagined; makes every day” bigger than life.”…than lost life, …an unexamined life; than continuing to think that life will never end”

And how we hugged each other!

I remember this part vividly:

David holding me against his hairy chest as he whispered: “Mavourneen, this- us here right now on this beach, this is the realization of the nature of life, of NOW, of standing- out-from everydayness. This moment is one of choosing to live in the mystical actively.”

At this memory, I find myself succumbing to sleep- which has been elusive since David died- a minor weight has been lifted.

Waking up an hour later, I am disoriented, but less agitated,

I grab sleep like a savage hoarder,

I stagger over to the kitchen table. Reading the headline of the NYT’s is enough to make a maggot gag; our country is spiraling out of control.

How do I go through this Sunday alone?

There has become a clarity that was lacking before, of idealism in my love of, for and with David. Not poetic imprint. More a rationalist’s dye that has lifted for me the buried words that had emblazoned themselves on the escutcheon of my verbalized beliefs.

How do I thank him for the debt I owe him for the long brewing ruminations of our ongoing conversations? The beaten horse of our idealism ain’t near dead yet.

I owe him so much. For sending a ladder down the shaft of my feelings alone….and to that extent lost…and accepting the lostness as part of the restlessness that surrounds the human condition. He felt it all. And because of it, he not only sent the ladder down into the pit, but he also hoisted the ladder out.

And the celebrations! The delicious wrestlings with the thoughts and descriptions of a shared life.

I get up and grab an apple.

Munching on it, my mind returns to the memory of the voice of that woman on the beach. Tomorrow morning, I will retrace my steps and somehow put a resolution to it.

As I walk the shore, today- the next day- I find myself scouring the dunes, searching the hidden coves for a lone woman. And coward that I am, I am relieved that no one is about. That is what I love the most about these crack of dawn walks-the silence.

Nature, life renewals unleashed.

And thinking that, I realize that I have lived my life as a chimera--searching out the presuppositions of our world, observing and critiquing all the ways the systems in life should work., and constantly, an exhaustive and ever- redefined analysis of the fallibility we human beings carry.

Who can I share this with now?

“David, where are you?” I beseech quietly to myself.

And upon asking that question, I hear that wail again!

The woman is back !

I look towards the dunes, where the sound came and I charge like mad up the hill to try to locate her. I must help her!

But no one is there!

I run to the other end of the beach, and from distance of about one hundred yards, I spot her!

She is at the far end of Harbor Neck, and the wind is blowing about her, tossing her hair wildly about. She is kneeling in the sand, rocking back and forth on her knees, moaning.

I run down off the dunes, and as I get closer to her, my heart begins racing rapidly. She is sobbing and her words are muffled, incoherent. Something about her terrifies me. I stop abruptly and as I do, I fall again.

I take my time getting up.

I don’t want to help her.

Something about her makes me sick.

God forgive me.

But her pain is too raw.

Once more, I scramble away, breathing shakily; off the beach, onto our street, which encloses a small enclave of homes, nestled quaintly against the woods.

I run past the split maple tree that seems to be calling out to me:

“I am here! Look at me!”

I stop to gaze up at the tree and it is funny, but I feel David is part of this tree.

I look intently at the whole of the tree.

It makes me weep.

God bless its life.

It shook out its entire heart for all of us.

Birds made their homes in this tree.

And they sang to all of us from its branches.

Its leaves were like honey wheat that tossed in the breeze.

It kept peace in our days and our nights.

And now it has been split in half.

I feel David urging me back, to the beach, to help the woman.

Reluctantly, I begin to run back.

Past the boardwalk and the closed restrooms.

Up over the dunes and onto the sand, running to catch up to the woman who is now running in the opposite direction.

“Wait! Please wait for me!”

But the woman doesn’t pay any attention to my words and she keeps running.

It takes me a while, but I am gaining on her.

I can hear her now.

“Stop chasing me! Leave me alone!” she yells at me.

Her voice is familiar.

From the back, she looks a lot like someone I know.

But I cannot place her.

I have finally caught up to her.

I beg her:

“Please, stop running! I am here to help you. What can I do for you?”

My equilibrium is uprooted as she turns around.

The air instantly becomes charged with electricity.

As I reach out to touch her forearm, she evaporates into thin air.

The light absorption of reality assails me.

I am fallen.

The tracks of panic have caused this aberration.

The elocution of grief has caught me, and I collapse onto the beach wracked by wretched sobbing.

The woman’s voice was my own!

Is my own!

I have been chasing myself.

The spinning grenade of grief has been unpinned.

I fall backwards onto the beach to absorb the entirety of the pain; I let the barricaded emotions out.

Tears cascade down my cheeks and into my clavicle.

“David, oh David, I love you. It has been eighty-six days since you left me here. I am not well. I am not okay. Don’t let me get crazy, too. I cannot bear being insane on top of all this pain.”

And just like that, something passes over me: some radiant light; some pure energy.

I sit up and I feel him next to me. I can hear him laughing at me:

“Really? A lunatic in our midst? Get over yourself, sweetie. It is just a matter of imagination. Choose possibility over predictability. Find the unimaginable in daily life, Mavoureen.. That is where I will be.”

The predator called death did not capture David.

I stand to look at the glistening sunshine on the waves.

The defoliation of grief has begun.

And in its wake, the inexplicable joy of knowing the flamethrower of love has captured me- eternity awaits.