Letters to Michael: A Final Tribute
June 14, 2012


Dearest Michael, you are now lost at sea in your favorite place and mine, the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez.  Last night, just one day shy of two months since your departure from me, and your life, we celebrated you once again.  This time on a much more intimate level, with friends Tom and Mary Malone, who had missed your wonderful celebration at home.  Also present were our neighbors Christy and Jan Davids and Baja neighbor, and new friend, Jane McGee, who I have grown to love. Even though Jane and I do not share the same political ideals it doesn’t matter, we are women sharing the Sea of Cortez and many other thoughts and values in common.   Our event began with appetizers, Tom’s special rum drink and many memories of you.  I read my tribute to you and we showed the DVD of your life.  I was struck by how difficult it was for me to read my tribute this second time.  Unlike at your original ceremony, this was an intimate group and I had to pause several times and to gain composure just so I could continue to read through my entire speech.  In this setting I wasn’t on stage with an audience of more than three hundred with their faces a blurred in the sea of humanity.  Here I didn’t have to be embarrassed by my tears in front of such good friends. I knew that the shock of your death and the numbness that got me through the first memorial had worn off.  With the passing days and months it is obvious that you are no longer coming back to us. Your absence is sadly real.  

So, as the sun set behind the scrub encrusted mountains, we lit our personally decorated luminaries; each one bearing an individual design representing a pictorial of your life.  Each boat held your Ashes, in individual receptacles, which we all took to the sea.  Carefully, we swam out a distance, sang “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” and gathered in a circle before casting you out into the warm water.  Two large pelicans swooped low over us and tipped their wings in tribute to you.  Other than the light of a few stars, and the illumination from our boats, we were swimming in complete darkness.   We laughed and told fun stories and then noticed a magical appearance of blue-green phosphoresce that sparkled around each boat as it moved with the dark waves pulsating underneath.  Then Tom’s beard began to sparkle, and soon we noticed more sparkling lights around each of us with every movement that was made. It was a night unlike any other and we will remember it always.

Death brings such finality.  Since your departure from this world I have had many hours to consider my life with you and wonder how I will ever deal with my life without you.  I have worked out the fact that there is no second chance to say I love you, no more time to tell you not to go.  I have run out of time to tell you how much you meant to me.  I will never again tell you how you have ruined any chance of me finding another man who could ever measure up to you.  Unguarded, multiple questions trouble me.  How will I spend the rest of my life?  What do I do next? How do I plan anything that doesn’t include you enjoying it with me?  With time I am learning that it is possible not to make plans.  Possible to laugh, to dance, to swim, to cry and not have you here to love me and support me.  I can do many things on my own.  I am happy not to have every day planned.  I don’t need to know the future.  It will take care of itself.  

Many years ago I wrote a paper for a philosophy class where I was grappling with life and the finality of death.   Sartre was the philosopher that I cited while I was trying to understand the finality of my mother’s recent death. Since she had lived in Kentucky at the time of her death, distance gave me the ability to suspend reality for a very long time. I could just imagine her going about her day collecting antiques, reading books, doing crossword puzzles, and traveling with my father.  She was alive to me even though I had watched her take her last breath and stood for two days at her wake staring into her open casket.   I wanted to believe I could call her even though I attended her funeral service and saw her coffin go into the earth in her hometown of Holly, Michigan.  I liked thinking she was still alive out there somewhere.   But then, five years later, I took a trip with my children to Holly to show them the cute Victorian town where she grew up, tell the stories to them that she had told me.  I also wanted them to visit the Holly cemetery where many of my relatives are buried. After lunch in a quaint refurbished railroad dining car, and a walking tour of the town, we stopped at the cemetery guard office to get directions to our family graves.  Then, as if an afterthought, I took a deep breath and also asked for the exact location of my mother’s grave hoping that the guard would laugh and tell me she wasn’t there. He cleared his throat and asked her full name. Then he blew off the dust from an oversized ledger book and after several fumbling minutes found her name just as I feared he would.  Next, he went to a file drawer, opened it, and pulled out a card that held her name and plot number, date of death, and date of internment.  It was only then, at that moment, that her death became real.  She was no longer antiquing in Kentucky.  She was really there in Holly Michigan, no longer a young teen skating on a pond near her home.  She was no longer a bashful beauty with thinly teased eyebrows, pin-curl wavy hair and pouty red lips. Though she was indeed, back in her hometown, where all the stories of her growing up originated.  This time she was really dead and permanently resting in the hard Michigan earth.   The reality knocked the wind out of me and the fantasy that she could be alive evaporated.  I also realized that this was the last notation of my dearly loved mother.  This would be the last time her name would be written and officially documented. 

Not long after this trip I got a job in the maternity ward in a tiny hospital in Chestertown, Maryland where my own children had been born.   Witnessing a birth of a child is exciting and brings tears to my eyes every time I witness the moment when the child takes its first breath and cries.  After the formalities of caring for that new life I was directed to an oversized ledger that contained all the births recorded in the last few years at that hospital. Blowing off the dust, and turning to the last page of this worn out book, I wrote the name of the parents, the sex of the child, date of birth, and the child’s name and apgar score.  The realization that we are but notations in two different books was sobering.  Yet, what we do with our life in between those two notations is rarely documented.    If we are lucky we leave behind a few pictures that follow our progression from birth to death.  If we have been really lucky we leave footprints in the minds of those we loved, those we disagreed with, and in those who shared the same philosophy. 

I won’t be searching for your grave.  You are floating in the Sea of Cortez and a bit of you will rest in our garden on Ninth Street.  But no matter where your Ashes are you will be with me just the same.  Where ever I go and whatever I do, I will love you and miss you for many more sunrises, dozens of full moons, numerous warm water swims, and with every slow dance.   I will miss you in times of happiness and sadness.

 To me you are more than just two notations documented at the beginning and end of life. You are there in the books of our travels around the globe. You are with me walking the colonial streets of Chestertown and visiting with my friends.  And you are the guy who gave up everything to be with me in Bethesda so I could graduate from Georgetown. But most of all, in my mind, you will always be that young guy newly in love with me.  When I am back home in Manhattan Beach you will be there to meet me in the middle of the crosswalk, near the bank, just as you did Thanksgiving of 1991.  I delighted in finding you coming toward me with your arms open wide, handsome as ever with that shockingly beautiful smile.  I run to be captured in your embrace, as you spin around in the street unaware of the traffic light change, and impatient motorists, who stare with warm eyes, knowing smiles, and visions of new love remembered as they witness us lost in each other’s arms.  I can wish you fair-well my prince but, I can never say goodbye.