Ommatidia » Joan

Joe and Joan

Brendan — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 23:25:19 +0000

He carried no life insurance; he scorned it as “betting on when you’re going to die.” He finally drew up a legal will, at her pleading, but it references a safety-deposit box at a bank that no longer exists.

Joe’s only system of organization was piles, and piles of piles. In the days following his death, she worked with a terrible dull urgency to bring order to it, to find what needed to be found. She’s still working. It must be done; it won’t be done soon.

What Joan has to do, now, is make sense of a life in pieces.

Joe

Brendan — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 03:57:04 +0000

He struck out from home at sixteen alone, hitching, as he often did for the first half of his life. He dyed his forelocks white-blond (his little sister told us, the admiration still in her voice) and drove a muscle car, which got stolen. He loved water; he joined the Coast Guard.

He always returned to Kentucky. He was a son of Kentucky, and the Kellys who settled its Kelly Ridge.

His fishing buddy Jimmy described a bridge over the Kentucky River where Joe would go, on hot days. Eighty feet at least, he said, from the surface; and Joe dove.

Joan

Brendan — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 03:56:51 +0000

Hell, my mother has absently mentioned, is her husband’s visitation. It’s hours of standing when she wants to lie down, anywhere, forever. It’s a line out the door. It’s the endless upkeep of her bravest face while people, so many people, tell her exactly the same things.

Dante had Virgil when he walked into Hell for love. Orpheus failed to bring back Eurydice, and it cost him his mind.

How do you stay human when you have twice walked into Hell, guideless? How do you learn to be yourself again, when you have twice walked out, and your love stayed behind?

Joe

Brendan — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 03:39:21 +0000

Joe’s business card says “Joe Wood, Builder.”

The first house Joe built for himself was a refurbished two-room schoolhouse. I’ve seen it only in pictures. The second stands unfinished at Kelly Ridge, on land settled by his ancestors–built, after his first marriage ended, by a man intent on being single forever.

The third is my mother’s apartment in Richmond, which he finished a month ago, just in time for their first anniversary. It’s so beautiful. To walk into it is to know its beauty, and understand that one man built it perfectly, with his hands, for the woman he loved.

Joan

Brendan — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 01:58:29 +0000

The only response to “I’m sorry” is “thank you,” because “I’m sorry” is such a flimsy response to death. So is a casserole, or a hug–do you really think that what she needs, right now, is another hug?

But of course such gifts are not really for the grieving.

This is the only appropriate gift for a widow: a minute of your life. A minute you would have spent breathing and loving, with your eyes open, warm. A minute from your long and many days, to bring your death that much closer, and let the two of them say goodbye.