Starry Starry Night

Headlights are the only stars I’ll see tonight. A reminder that December’s cloudy early dark is more bitter than the caustic chill of winter. The latter part of this year has been marked by loss; for my family, immediate, extended, and that of my close friends. Winter has brought another sharp reminder of this tenuous arrangement we call life and the constant, vicious state of vulnerability it exists in. The myriad of ways our lives can be thrown into mythic proportions of grief, by the vast ebonies of close, early night seem almost as innumerable as the hours unchecked by the flighty hue of day.

I watched them pack away the things that had belonged to my grandmother. Why I stayed I’ll never comprehend, perhaps the same way people can’t seem to look away from a horrific traffic accident. Clothes musty from too much time forgotten in the closet, the smell of her polluted by the drafty dirge of time. Jewelry doled out to distant relatives that I would see hanging from necks where they did not belong. Rings on fingers that weren’t hers. I couldn’t let them get rid of her bathrobe. The sight of the thing elicits such vivid memories of everything she had been. So it sits above my dryer, as forgotten and unused as the things that were packed into boxes to be given away to people who have no comprehension of what they once meant. Its better that way, that they end up in the hands of people who know the things as precisely that, inanimate objects, the way I could never classify them ever again.

Two weeks into my first experience as a student teacher I got the news that one of the most special people in my life had died. While not entirely unexpected, Gram had been very ill for a very long time, I found I was not nearly as prepared for the finality of the idea as I had thought. In all reality, it was a fortunate event that quelled years of suffering.

That thought did nothing to assuage the strange and empty feeling I woke up with realizing again and again that this was a world without her in it.

Gram-less as it was however, the world went on, and I went to my placement the next day and found myself eager to engage with the second graders, and leave the sorrow behind for a few hours. The following week I attended the service and after an emotionally charged and draining day filled with family, condolences and mini cocktail sandwiches, I was again glad to return to the routines of the second grade. On recess duty that next day I received many hugs from the class before they ran off to join kickball and basketball games.

What caught me completely off guard was one little girl who tugged my coat sleeve gently. She looked up at me with dewy brown eyes and said slowly, “I’m sorry someone died.” My heart stuttered in my chest as she quickly hugged me and ran off across the playground. Willing myself to breathe deeply, the bells rang and it was time to go inside. After recess I was grading papers. The assignments I read instructed students to relate an event from their summer.

Between pages of camping and trips to national parks, I was forced to fight back tears again as I came to the little girl’s paper. She had lost her grandmother in July I discovered, and in the eloquence of a seven year old expressed that she still missed her.