One might have thought that as time passes the heart might harden as arteries harden and the sense of loss grow less acute as the five familiar senses most certainly tend to do. But it is not so. Eyes grow dull with age but griefs do not grow dull. And, naturally, as one gets old and then older still the occasions for feeling grief multiply.
The passage of time between sadnesses brought on by losing close family or beloved friends now quickens almost by the month. This week I have read a lovely sonnet by W S Merwin which is a meditation on how quickly time passes measured by the seasons which we in the tropics do not know but the changing beauty of which I am glad to have experienced a few times. We think fields will always be green but they are not so. In youth we think we are immortal but we are not. The poem is ‘Youth of Grass’ and I always associate it with the grief of time passing and final farewells.
Youth of Grass
down along the meadows by the river
through all the bright hours they cut the first hay
of this year to leave it tossed in long rows
leading into the twilight and long evening
while thunderheads grumbled from the horizon
and now the whole valley and the slopes around it
that look down to the sky in the river
are fragrant with hay as this night comes in
and the owl cries across the new spaces
to the mice suddenly missing their sky
and so the youth of this spring all at once is over
it has come upon us again taking us
once more by surprise just as we began
to believe that those fields would always be green
And there is the poem ‘The Trestle’ by Raymond Carver which I have known for years and it never fails to move me. Carver was an American poet and short story writer who died at the age of 49 from cancer. He wrote many of his best poems and stories when he knew he was dying. This poem is about his father and whenever I read it I remember my own wise and gentle father who meant so much to me. He died in 1995 but the grief I felt then still comes back.
The Trestle
I went to bed last night thinking about my dad.
About that little river we used to fish – Butte Creek –
near Lake Almanor. Water lulled me to sleep………
Fir trees stood on both sides of the meadows.
And I was there.
a kid sitting on a timber trestle, looking down,
Watching my dad drink from his cupped hands.
Then he said, “This water’s so good.
I wish I could give my mother some of this water.”
My dad still loved her, though she was dead
and he’d been away from her for a long time.
He had to wait some more years
until he could go where she was. But he loved
this country where he found himself. The West.
For thirty years it had him around the heart,
and then it let them go. He went to sleep one night
in a town in northern California
and didn’t wake up. What could be simpler?
I wish my own life, and death, could be so simple.
So that when I woke on a fine morning like this,
after being somewhere I wanted to be all night,
somewhere important, I could move most naturally
and without thinking about it, to my desk.
Say I did that, in the simple way I’ve described
From bed to desk back to childhood.
From there it’s not so far to the trestle.
And from the trestle I could look down
and see my dad when I needed to see him.
My dad drinking that cold water. My sweet father,
The river, its meadows, and firs, and the trestle.
That. Where I once stood.
I meditate on sadness – as we must all do. But sadness is not depression nor dejection nor despair. One does not cease to love life every hour. Sadness is not debilitating. Tears do not blind one’s eyes, they make them gleam. Sadness is a spur to remembering what it is to be alive and capable of treasuring the rich gifts of the world. The memories of those we have lost merge with the lives and joys of those who still surround us with so much promise.
This last month a grand-daughter came into the lives of my wife and myself. A couple of hours with her and our marvellous two-year-old grandson puts sadness in the perspective in which we must always place it.