to Ronnie, with love

The past few months, I’ve been practicing patience. Not gracefully, but kicking and screaming. The thing about life is that we don’t always get to choose what happens. We might break fourteen bones and have to wait eons for them to heal. A friend that we’re really attached to might move to Austin. Our kids might find their dream jobs far away. We might leave a job we’ve loved and done for years. We might find out that a cousin, who was more like a brother, is dead. All of this could happen in one year, making life downright confusing.  Like a town where all of the streets get rearranged overnight. You want to instantly know how to find everything again, but you can’t till you’ve driven around awhile getting used to the new arrangement.

     Adjustment comes slowly. You have to wait. You have to practice patience till, bit-by-bit, a new normal is revealed. Though the process is slow, it’s not all bad. You get to learn the beauty of small favors. Like a cup of hot coffee in the morning, and the way the sky looks a different shade of beautiful each morning, and the smell of honeysuckle growing by the mailbox. When your bones finally heal, you get to realize how incredible it is to not be in pain. You learn to savor each moment with the people you love. These small things might seem trivial in the scheme of life, but they’re not. They ‘re the now, and what’s life but a series of nows all lined up? So I've been practicing my nows.

     This poem is about that struggle as it relates to grief. Last September, I found out my cousin, Ronnie was dead. He and I were the same age. Our moms were sisters, and, we all lived together, on and off for half of my childhood starting when we were three. Our siblings were all in school then, so Ronnie and I spent all day every day together playing in our Florida backyard. Mostly we caught chameleons, building elaborate houses for them from mayonnaise jars and cereal boxes, and we dug in the sand for treasure. We unearthed a huge concrete block, which we were convinced was a valuable ancient relic.

     From the start Ronnie was a somber kid, having already been abandoned for a year and then reclaimed by his mom. He and I mostly played silently, as we could communicate without using words. I loved him instantly, and always knew what a good and capable kid he was. As we grew, I could see that he didn’t get to have the kind of life he deserved. I hated that. Any fool could see how much potential he had. When we were thirteen, I silently vowed that my (future) kids would be raised with all of the love that Ronnie had deserved.  That unspoken promise was all I had to offer him, and it has stuck with me as a galvanizing force.

     The last time I saw him, we were nineteen. I lost track of him shortly after that. For years, I’ve tried to look him up, but lots of people share his name, and I didn’t know which state. I suspected he had died, but hoped he was okay. But then, last September, a relative found his death certificate on Ancestry. He’d died in 1993 at age 32.

     I’ve been struggling to make peace with the loss ever since. I’ve lost many relatives, close ones even, but never completely understood grief until now. Mostly, I miss what Ronnie could have been. I want to get to the acceptance stage, to make sense of his loss, but the process absolutely has its own agenda and cannot be hurried. It’s getting easier, but only step by step. Writing helps some. I couldn't find a good picture of him, so I am trying to draw one from memory. That's the picture here, though it's still in progress. Maybe when I finish the picture, I'll have finished the grief work. Today would have been Ronnie's fifty-first birthday.

Grief

Grief has to run its course.

Can’t be forced.
Can’t be pushed up, out, nor in.
Can’t be persuaded to end.

Grief must wind, meander

where it will,
visit old haunts, call up

images of times past; that
face you thought would last.

Grief must condense a life

into a few important scenes,
must dictate what gets
carried and what’s laid down.

If the lost was young,

and passed
too soon, too soon,
that pain will continue to
burn. Might get stuck
and stay a while,
as you keep askin’ God why
He took this child.

Grief is slow.

The answers are not clear.
Sometimes you
can only wait,
while holding the living near.

Grief makes me tired,

too tired to cry.
I hate that my cousin
had to die.