Sunday, July 12, 2026, is the fifth anniversary (is that the right word?)
of Colleen's death. (I'm starting this on the Friday before; don't know
when it will be finished and I'll probably edit this out anyway.) We had
been married fpr 45 years, and a couple for 50. Best friends for longer
than that.
I'm torn between wanting to tell a story, and wanting to say what things
are like for me now. (Of course, to do the latter, I'd have to figure out
what I'm feeling, and that's always been difficult.) Maybe I'll start
with a story. Sort of a story.
Back when we were living in San Jose, we used to love going for a drive.
Sometimes it would be to get someplace -- a convention in LA or Portland,
a restaurant in Monterey or Big Sur, a show or the zoo in San Francisco...
Sometimes it was a late-night drive trying to get a baby to go to sleep.
That worked with our older kid, but not the younger -- everything was way
too exciting. Oops.
The longer drives had a sound track -- Oak, Ash, and Thorn; Stan Rogers,
Dave Clement, The Grateful Dead, ... I'll save that for another time,
maybe a Saturday.
But eventually Colleen told me what I should have figured out sooner:
that she just liked sitting next to me when I wasn't distracted by a book
or a computer. Sometimes we'd talk; sometimes we'd get into an argument,
but mostly we'd just look at the scenery and quietly enjoy each other's
company. Often we'd take SR9 over the hill to Santa Cruz, North on
Highway 1, over 92 to the ridge where we could turn onto SR35 and go home.
There were redwoods at both ends, the ocean in between, and a
conveniently-located fruit and vegetable stand somewhere between Half Moon
Bay and Santa Cruz. Sometimes we'd just turn around at Santa Cruz, or
turn South and go to Gilroy or Monterey.
After we moved up to Seattle, we could circumnavigate Lake Washington,
sometimes after a trip to our dentist in Bothell, and after moving to
Whidbey go up over Deception Pass, South on I5, and back using the ferry
from Mukilteo. It was always the journey that mattered, and the coming
home.
I miss those drives.
I'm on a different journey these days. At least three journeys, actually:
one literal and two metaphorical. And unlike my drives with Colleen, my
immigration journey, my life journey, and my grief journey are both
one-way. One foot in front of the other. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow..." I often wake up with a quote or a bit of a song in my head.
Sometimes I recite it to Bronx before I get out of bed, but I don't think
he pays it much attention.
Recently, increasingly, the poem fragment I wake up with is the last verse
and a half of Yeats's "Sailing to
Byzantium":
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
That's going to be a Songs for Saturday post as well some day. I'm not too happy with my
body these days. It works even less well than it ever did. I'm not too
happy with my brain, either. At least they're both still
working.
I don't have any illusions about immortality -- eternity scares me
-- nor any kind of afterlife besides the one I imagine in my memorial
posts, which you can find in my Rainbow Bridge pages. But when I'm gone, I'll live on with her there
as long as our friends, our families, and the Internet Archive remember us. That will do.
And somewhere over the The
Rainbow Bridge Colleen is sitting, surrounded by cats, and holding a
tall glass of gin-and-tonic. She raises her glass in the general
direction of Midgard and takes another sip.
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