March 18, 2024
Greetings from the celebration,
“We are a part of a Mystery we do not understand, and we are grateful.” Brian Doyle
This is a prayer I have spoken with friends around a table of food, whispered alone on a long run, or deep in the forest, held silently when I didn’t want to disturb whatever living I was in. It is a small way I remind myself that there will always be things I don’t understand, not because I am not capable, but because it is part of my purpose to wonder. And so, in spite of the struggle of wondering, I am incredibly fortunate to be living in that unknown.
The Mystery includes the things that are astonishing, the miracles and the magic and the unbelievable. And it includes the tragic, the unfair, the heartbreak, the dark edge of things, the impossible and the regret and the missed moment.
When my daughter Katherine was still a toddler, her brothers were born. It was an exciting time, one that the whole family was whirled into, and changed by. Thirty years ago, yesterday, my boys were born, Harrison, Carson and Sawyer. And their brother, Alexander, maybe just hours before, slipped into this other place, where he waits even now.
There has been a lot of life in those three decades, a lot of celebrating. Thirty birthdays, and countless milestones in between those days. It has been a joy to watch my children grow into beautiful people, now grown and living rich, interesting lives.
In all of that living there is a Mystery. Friction, cells multiplying, coincidence, love, prisms, poetry, randomness, chaos, perfection, splinters, snowflakes, dissolved memories.
I bring this all to the page today because it is in me to celebrate my sons on their thirtieth birthday, and I cannot do that without Alexander. His absence makes their celebration more vivid, more intense, more important. I will never understand, not in this life anyway, the why behind the loss of him. But it matters to me that I keep it in the same place where I honor the presence, the why, of his brothers.
Alexander’s life is part of the mystery. He exists in the moments between the moments. Three decades of potential living, a tattoo on my life to remind me of the value of each of the days we spent without him. His purpose is in that mystery.
His absence illuminates. It is the light of the missing, the lack of something, the sensation of a blank space. It is a ceasing, the soft moment when the last chord is played on the piano and only the reverberation is in the air, felt as much as heard. He is between was and wasn’t, between is and isn’t, the space of the apostrophe, the fraction and fracture between two consonants that tell us there was a vowel, but it is not seen, just understood.
If you stand at the edge of a high cliff and close your eyes your senses will offer a new experience. You know the sound is different, the air feels different, you may even feel a struggle for balance, because you know that the world is gone. Or at least part of it. That feeling, the awareness of absence, is how I feel my son Alexander. Not a daily burden, not some dark obsession, just the awareness in between everything else I know in my life.
There is science and experience to explain some of what happens in our living, and that is helpful, though not always. And our understanding of what takes place, good and bad and in between, is filtered through our life and beliefs and philosophies and attitudes and maybe what we ate yesterday. And what is left in life, including in the moments between the moments, remains a mystery.
I love my sons, and I think more of their living than I do of Alexander’s not living, but they are not separated by much else. Just this thin blade of light, this wisp of a breath, the immeasurable breadth where a shadow could begin, and the light could ease.
I sense that these people we miss, like my son Alexander, are closer than we expect. I think they are in the moment we try to remember a word, or whatever it is that inspires us to laugh, that little lightness of being in our core. I think they are in the shift of night to morning, the last essence of a dream, the glimmer in a dappled pond, that is there and not there in almost the same breath.
“We are a part of a Mystery we do not understand, and we are grateful.” It matters that you don’t rush past the first part of the prayer: “We are part of a mystery…” not just players in it, but part of it. We are a mystery, to ourselves and others, one that is not simply math and biology and chemistry to be solved.
I mention this because it reminds me to be in awe of each of you, along with my sons and daughter. You are much more than just an astonishing collection of cells, a miracle of synapses, a wild joyful whirl of life. You are your experiences, the exchanges with everyone you ever met, and your will, and your dreams, and your future. You are all that and you are also what lives between where the light meets the shadow, which holds all the other Mystery, including where Alexander is.
Hope this finds you wondering,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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