Big Ol' Cycle

man, this death stuff is heavy this week; the moon's getting darker.
this is part of a letter to my brother, d~, dated 24 august 2006. i'd forgotten it had been over a year. how did i forget?...
...feel all weird posting this, self-indulgent as all hell, but...sometimes that ain't so bad. -rd


on another note of longing, my amazing, ornery, foul-mouthed, big hearted, "darlin-i'll-always-keep-a-cowgirl-hat-for-you" texas grandad just died monday; his funeral's today. i am so fucking heartsore i can hardly breathe these mornings, too fed up with death and dying and suffering and missed opportunities and untold stories and lost links to other perspectives that i deeply treasure. i'm fuckin heavy with love that has lost three outlets this year, and with grandad it lost one of its main arteries. oh, d~... if ever there were a year to learn how to mourn and how to survive.... goddamn it. it's been 5 years since i've seen grandad. five motherfuckin years. i never wrote, never called. couldn't bear to hear his robust voice made small and flat by telephone lines. couldn't bear to try and write all the stuff i only know how to say with my eyes, to try and waste all my splendid vocabulary on a man who had no time for such things, who only had time for gut feelings that are too big for words. he was the first grown-up man i ever loved. ever. he was the first one to ever tell me i could do anything boys could do, that i'm just as smart (if not moreso) than boys and not to let anyone ever tell me different; he was the first one to lay out so many truisms in such plain language, language no one else i've known has been able to match: "just cause a boy's got a pecker don't mean he can tell it from his brain." he stood up for me to my dad. he wrote to me every year on my birthday, these past few always asking me to come and see them when i got the chance. ...fuck! fuck, Fuck, FUCK! and today they're putting him in the ground. today, six feet of earth step up to close the bridge that death first set afire. oh, d~, my heart wails a ululation as deep and slow as the very earth's rumblings today; i cannot separate this sorrow from the immense, unstoppable river of all humanity's woe. jeremy and jason's deaths were large rooms in my house burning down; grandad's exit is fully a third of my foundation rattled loose and crumbled beneath me. i don't know where to stand. i haven't been able to tell anyone about this, outside my housemates i mean, who were there when i found out. it's like i don't know how to say it. i don't know how to say "my grandad's dead" without it sounding small and insignificant, without belittling the enormity of its impact on me, without making it sound like just another body has passed from the earth instead of one of its titans. grief is a growling like no other hunger. i feel like a goddamned seive, full of holes, my love and perpectives and reasons for actively living, draining and changing, eroding down to nothing so that i might have room to rebuild them. ...at least, that's how i'm dealing this year. today, though...

today my bones cry.