You cannot measure a life in words. It feels nearly futile to even try. The deeper the connection, the more words fail us. Like the gradations of color between chartreuse and lime green, or the difference of synonyms between sarcastic and sardonic, we cannot capture even the smallest thoughts or memories… instead, our words are the crashing of waves on sand, lost even as they leave their mark, and erased by the next.
Coffins should not be baby sized. It feels almost blasphemous to put a body in the ground when it has never taken breath. How much more cheated can one be than when they bury the hopes they had for a child they barely held? The heart hollows and holds an echo for the life hoped for and never lived.
If we plant them, do they come back? My son pondered the burial ceremony as we dug the hole for Hank this summer. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he said, “If burying them was like planting them, and we would get Hank again, from the beginning all over again, because we planted him here?”
He barked at me in my sleep the other night. It woke me up, because I knew it wasn’t real; couldn’t be real. Hank. Is. Gone.
But he remains, along with all the other lost but beloved members of my life, collected in pages of memory in my heart. He is just the most recent loss that sometimes barks, says hello, or just comes quietly to rest beside me and remind me, just for awhile, that there was more, and I was loved. Age, accidents and incidents have lost many mementos collected over the years to remind me of special friends. Gifts from them, little things they owned.
Every night, though, my husband’s cheap Chinese watch alarm goes off. We accidentally turned it on trying to figure out how to set the watch (the instructions, alas, were in Chinese). Never could figure out how to turn the alarm back off, and now I don’t want to. I expected it to die by now, but still, it keeps going, outlasting its owner now by nearly five years. Every night, I hear that darn watch beeping, and I am reminded…
…the things we bury don’t always stay quiet.