When my girls ask about dying, we come quickly to the topic of compost. They know well that things change once they stop living—even right inside in our kitchen.
The bird we found drowned one morning in the backyard wading pool? We buried it, and my girls know its body has become dirt, and part of the dirt has become clover, become oxygen exhaled by the round leaves, been inhaled by a mouse that was eaten by an owl that will die and become dirt, bark, leaves, the air we’ll breathe and the dust on the windowsill and the tomatoes in the garden.
I tell them these things, and they accept them as true, enthralling, and (I don’t think I’m mistaken) reassuring. They want to know what happens. I tell them. Parts of us keep going.
This weekend I flew across the country to my old friend’s funeral. I knew when I booked the ticket that this was both ridiculous and necessary. This family, I had not seen in a good 13 years. The son, closer to 20. Haven’t been in touch beyond Christmas cards and Facebook. And yet I couldn’t make the thought of not coming here sit right. Maybe I needed to check that he really wasn’t here anymore.
Back home, big flakes of snow fell today. And here, there are bougainvillea blooming, and clusters of trumpet-shaped flowers as long as my hand, half-open and pointing toward the ground, and ginkgo trees with fan leaves turned half-yellow. In yards beside little houses are trees thick with oranges, and I am unabashedly foreign to this place in my awe: Oranges growing right there! I slow down to gawk and cause traffic problems.
How strange to be in the place where these friends have lived for 20 years (which don’t feel as long as 20 years). To hear stories of a year of sickness, half-hope, and pain. To hear new friends talk about the Paul they’ve known, and recognize the person I used to know.
To kill time by driving among donut shops and taquerias and well preserved 1950s neon signs and OH MY GOD CITRUS TREES to the stern voice of my borrowed GPS: Recalculating.
Part of me believes maybe some of him is still hanging out here.
At the funeral we sang:
I danced on a Friday and the sky turned black;
it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back;
they buried my body and they thought I’d gone,
but I am the dance and I still go on.
Well, yes and no, right? Yes, the owl, the orange tree, the air in this town. But it doesn’t go on the way we with our little minds wish it would. The way his wife of 25 years wishes it would. His sons, grown and brave but still needing him. Wanting him. And god damn, it is hard to dance with the devil on your back. Poor Paul.
