Spasms of Memories

“The elements have emerged into solicitude.
Spasms of violets rise above the mud
And weeds, and soon the birds and ancients
Will be starting to arrive, bereaving points
South. But never mind. It is not painful to discuss.
His death. I have been primed for this -
For separation - For so long...”

― Louise Gluck, winner of 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, “The Racer’s Widow”

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Dear Alex,

I worked longer hours on Veterans Day yesterday, burying one task followed by another in completion, rarely recalling the birth of events that had launched each of them. Most of my office hours traversed the pandemic terrain, stuck in the worst week of record-viral warfare. How long will it take to fight for a life lived?

“Lives Lived” is a daily column tucked near the end of my morning email feeds from The New York Times. Today’s remembrance of one separated life rests on a line as solitary as transcending: “David Toole, Disabled Dancer with Grace, Dies at 56.” I am able to dance but I don’t do it anyways.

In my annual health exam by telemedicine, my doctor tells me I am perfect. He laughs about finding no reason to whine about me. I run 5k for 5 days a week on treadmill and eat avocado toast religiously for breakfast. At this rate of my living a dull life, he humors me with the statistics on mortality for a mid-aged perfect patient. There is only one way for me to risk a premature death: a car accident, particularly from a collision at a left-turn lane.

A life lived, long enough to be remembered whether at 56 or 16, crashes at “bereaving points” over in folds. You can prime yourself for the “spasms of violet” and bruises but they come still more certainly. The collisions and combat in life, especially a life wheezing to live in the most ordinary chokehold of work/school/parenthood, are inimitably expressed in our daily war dance. My pastor seizes the question on Matthew 7: what foundation do you choose to build your house on - rock or sand? It is a decision not for the fighter or coward, privileged or poor but for the wise or ignorant.

What difference does a veteran make to me? I think back to my 80-year-old mother wounded in her marriage, my childhood caregiver of 7 years whose breasts blackened from necrotic metastasis, frumpy working housewives with arthritic hands making mighty meals everyday in flawed homes behind schedule and frontline, the millions of immigrants whose votes matter in ballot and faith, a passerby yesterday at the clinic passing a compliment on my decomposing dress, my predestined posture as a sidekick vulnerable to this Autumn morning as lustrous as poetry for the scavenger looking to learn a new dance worthy of remembrance.

Yours, Kate