Trained. That's what it is. Early training in loss that rests just so on the bridge of my nose, my lens on the world. I learned long ago, it's that or nothing.
No different this New Year's Eve. Between Web2.0 and firefox, between Jarvis and Searls, between all the links we weave together, are raw wounds that have nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with business, that have everything to do with love and the slicing pain of loss.
And there's more where that came from, as they say when they want you to know how bad it can get.
Been catching in my throat all week, a prelude to the year ahead, some losses-to-be already in release mode, my alpha grief, three months, six months, waiting for me to come, to test me, and to measure, a plan of loss with milestones marked by a bowed head and soaked, crumpled tissues.
I noticed it two days ago when Jenna climbed in bed with me to talk about 2006; she understands the closing and opening of things in a way I never could. As she spelled out our new year's eve plans complete with yogurt and chocolate soy milk, I snapped back into my father's skin.
I'm him looking at me at six, a little younger than she is now, not much, and at the same time I'm me sitting with him, his paisley pajamas, the smell of so-sick mixed with fresh, pressed cotton sheets; my mother would settle for nothing less, even in his dying.
I am both of us at once; I can't breathe from the sensation of it.
Under the fine blade of a surgeon's knife, I open to what he felt then, tender, destroyed, hopeful, not letting go with his eyes, index finger against my cheek, an elbow propping his weak frame onto familiar feather pillows.
In an instant, I know his unknowing.
I am him knowing the largeness of everything about to be missed, every tick of every clock, every movement forward. Every loose hair wound around the bristles of my little-girl hairbrush, every ribbed collar of every faded t-shirt I would ever wear, every drop of every glass that would shatter and need sweeping, every eyelash brushed away with every tear.
Still.
The enormity of what is about to be lost -- that, perhaps, is the death in dying.
