with love, for that is all
"When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them." — Isak Dinesen Out of Africa, 1937
It’s hard to imagine death. Like love, it is a state that knows no other, knows neither past nor future. It is a fact of being that excludes all others. But we shouldn’t have to think of it that way. Like a tale well told, often the meaning of the climax eclipses us, seems to hold a seed of the unmentionable, the thing that excludes description nor understanding in words.
He was a jolly old man, who told numerous bad jokes and played the trumpet. Always sitting at the head of the table, his eyes looked outwards at life with an egotism that was honest. That made him loveable. His body ressembled a basketball in life, round, tapering bluntly at the head and feet. In death, his skin was cool, like any other. The sky was piercingly blue the day he was lowered into the ground. There were many at the funeral, and there were many who really missed the old man. It is in those who continue to love him that straightens the graveyard, giving sense to the sharp lines of the branches and the blank thud of a rose hitting the wood.
Au revoir, cher Roland.
