There Has Been A Loss

French painter Émile Friant [1863 - 1932] Le Doleur (Sorrow). Le Doleur currently hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, France

We are preparing the children and ourselves to leave early tomorrow morning, a three and half hour drive ending somewhere past Los Angeles, to attend the funeral of Mr. Curry's Aunt Linda. I have known Linda for a decade, not well, but the way extended family does, in the undercurrent of some measure of intimacy, bound by blood and marriage: ' Your husband has known my husband since birth, birthdays and parties and gatherings and reunions, therefore you and I have a common bond. ' Linda and Jim, Mr. Curry's uncle, had four daughters, three together and one from Linda's previous marriage. All six of them came every year to the desert trips in Ocotilla Wells, the girls, Trish, Laura, Anna and Jaime, and their parents, Linda and Jim. The girls and their mother all had an easy similarity, outfitted in tight jeans and riding boots, slim figures and long brown hair. Linda braided their hair and rode quads with them and sat around the campfire laughing.

After a long, terrible year, Linda killed herself a few weeks ago, far away from her husband and her daughters, and even farther away from the person and mother she was for the years of raising her girls. The youngest, Anna, is about 21. The reasons why a woman would cleave herself from family and dive furiously into drug abuse and despair are Linda's to know, for our speculation only. We can only support her husband and daughters as they come to grips with what most likely is something that cannot gripped- suicide, a concentrated and purposeful turning from any and all help or love, and into pain. To imagine what a person must be feeling to take their life, with four beautiful children and a brand new grandson she will never know... I can only imagine she had an inner wound that had been held at bay in the raising and loving of her girls, and when the youngest was old enough, the wound grew all encompassing.

There is an blog mommy that just found out her four year old son, Ezra, has luekemia. And another who lost her son and wrote a book about it. And on, and on, as we live, unless we are very, very lucky, we encounter more and more tragedy in our friends lives and eventually in some way, in our own. At times the stillness of grief fills me. I will look out the window of my sunroom and pause. I will watch a bird or one of our cats or just the leaves of the large bushes up against the glass. I will remember my childhood, brief snippets of suffering that I still marvel I escaped from. I grieve my sister, who I have not seen in six years. I grieve for the child I was. I grieve for my Grandmother and my Grandfather. I understand what kind of hurt can cause a person to take their own life. I understand the blackness and pointlessness that can fill a person, unbearable.

I think about my children, each one, Dakota and his long limbed beauty, his newly shaved head, his incredible intelligence and deep understanding of the world, the sweetness of his nose, Ian and his sweet hearted tenderness so carefully hidden, his long, long eyelashes, the incredible brain that gives him A after A, Lola, her delicious 'creampuffs', cheeks, her sweet kisses, her incredibly infectious laugh, her endearing awkwardness, and this new baby, this mystery, this tiny life that moves inside of me already. And I will just shake my head. Because I have no answers. I have no understanding of how, if you lose someone you love like I love them, like most parents love their children, like a husband can love his wife, how you do anything but lay on your bed and wail, and wail, and wail.

I do not believe in God. I look out my window and think I only know two things about this. One is that I have a deep and unreasonable belief that life itself is precious and mysterious and that it is somehow my duty, simply because I was born, to make the best of it that I possibly can. I have always felt this way. Even then. Two is that I want my children to have the same belief , to move forward in joy and in pain. So- We may not move on but we move, damnit. We put our feet forward. We breathe in and out. We eat. We love who we can love as well as we can. We think of those who are gone and perhaps they fill us every second of every day and sleep or awake is the shadow of their loss like the great cancerous warning of an MRI, but in some kind of dedication- however faulty and ugly we are as we go- that can be the fine bravery and beauty of human life, we keep living.