AncienTrails

Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

“I can not image being in Bill’s shoes tonight – trying to accept the finality of her (Regina’s) death and the terrible silence that must be filling the space with the passing of his lover.”    Stefan Helgeson by e-mail

Stefan is a poet and a good one.  His phrase, terrible silence, stuck with me, rattled around. Death causes our friends and lovers to go mute.  They can no longer respond to us.  No more tenderness exchanged at bed time.  No more joint decision making.  No more grocery lists.  Just.  Terrible silence.

This is true and it lasts.  My mother has been deaf to my questions and care for now over 48 years, longer than she was alive.  Death is final and final in a brutal way.  It brooks no second chances, no wait a minutes.  It finishes what life has wrought.

Then we are left with memory.  It is no wonder the ancient Greeks, those of Homer’s era, believed true immortality came only through the poet.  The poet could provide aid to memory, verses hammered out in a form for easy recall.  The poet chose the words and the perspective through which an individual, from Achilles to Paris, would be remembered for all time.  This alone bestowed immortality.

We have more tools.  Cameras.  Voice recordings.  Easily available pen, ink, paper.  Computers and digital storage.  But, I don’t know that we have better tools.  Though a picture may be worth a thousand words, it doesn’t mean as much as a thousand well-chosen words.

So, for all of you who read this and knew Regina, write.  Write about her.  She wrote.  Now take up the pen and write.  In this way Regina can live for a thousand years.