Nine Decades Gone
You can walk through the cemeteries, feel grass whisper against
your ankles, and understand that everyone you knew for most or all of your life,
are gone from this earth.
Their voices, their laughter once sounds that elated all, gave
you special moments to anticipate, but will fade as memories do, or pass into
yesterday when you close your eyes in the final blink.
I think life will become too quiet,
somber moments of reflection will then fill the niches where new memories might
have formed with new tomorrows if you were not alone.
Wondering where time went, why life is
fleeting even though you survived wars, depression, and poverty, and now you look
at the calendar and see ninety years passed since your birth. Astonishing, grievous,
time swallowed your life completely, perhaps even unexpectedly.
A fallen shadow may waver across the mown
lawn under your hesitant step. There may be moonlight to illuminate the way,
crawling up the side of headstones, buildings, blocking grief with the knowledge
that once years past, that same light lit her face on the first night you sat
together.
You held hands, leaning close, a gentle
kiss marked the promise, planning in your hearts for the future, which would be
yours, knowing that all of life lay spread out before you, a feast of time and
experiences yet to be enjoyed.
Your life filled with thousands of
events, failures and joys, hellos and goodbyes. Living was like tripping up a
flight of stairs, sliding down an ice-coated hill on the toboggan of preparation.
Early in life each day seemed endless,
the clock glacial. Three decades passed and time began a peculiar rush forward,
one that seemed never to delay but to speed up.
Children became adults, had children,
which then became adults, and then time quietly clicked doors shut behind which
friends and family once resided. Until now, you stand alone in a cemetery,
walking through ankle high grass hoping the new moon overhead meant that life
had meaning, fulfillment, but never knowing with certainty as you lower
yourself to your knees and pray alongside her resting place.
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