letters
J. Speer
My mother saved all my letters and when she was at home dying of cancer, I typeset them on a manual machine, no electric connection needed. We listened to records I checked out of the public library: Pete Fountain, “Fountain in the Rain” and Duke Ellington, “The Cotton Club Stomp”. I dedicated a self published chap to her and picked up the books from the copy service the same day we lowered her into the ground. She is buried in Nashville in the military cemetery.
Mary reads books about death: “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. Although death is a constant companion and the zero point on the countdown of our days, Mary was unprepared with the reapers grim, brusque solicitation of her husband. She reads how people hover over their bodies while anesthetized on an operating table, enter a tunnel with a bright light at the end, hear classical music in stereo, receive salutations from loved ones gone before. “For everything here is an open path and a well-marked exit . . . it is only a thin curtain, spun by the fingers of nature and woven on the mysterious loom of time, which hides the known from the unknown, separates the now from the hereafter . . .”
- George M. Lamsa
Mary feels she is not long for this world. Maybe reading will prepare her for the final appointment. We need long term plans, goals, dreams, but can we stand ready daily, if we realize suddenly that the sand has run down the glass, can we put everything aside, say our prayers, goodbyes, and lay down in peace, content and ready for the change? One of many changes, some we experienced but don’t remember, like emerging from the womb into a world where we breath oxygen; some changes we recall vividly, form childhood to maturity, form idleness to creativity, from war to peace, from hunger to fulfillment.
The life/death pattern we can observe, like other patterns: “pasa una generaciùn y viene otra, levāntase el sol, se pone y corre con aften de llegar a su lugar, de donde vuelve a levantarse. Tira el viento al mediodia, gira al norte, va siempre dando vueltas y retorna a sus gires.”
Imagine yourself on a mountain top, a vast panorama in focus. Yet there is so much beyond your vision you cannot see: China, Ceylon, Lima, Madagascar, places beyond our vision we know exist. Maybe there are more elaborate patterns beyond our knowledge we have yet to learn about.
