Seven years: the return

I’ve never grieved anyone or anything else that way, I said, when challenged again, and again, and again, about the loss.

True.

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That last night, September 8, 2013, I wrote:

For some terrible minutes, coming down the mountain in falling dark, conviction: we can outrun it. If I just drive, and drive and drive, to Vermont, to Ripton, to Battell, right now, we’ll go back in time. He’ll be so strong again. We’ll have the wolves.

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Of course we could not outrun it, and by the next night, he was dead. And then I was mad, in the soul-quaking ancient sense of that word, in the desert, for a long time: they are all Enkidu, someone said to me then, and I railed at death, and neither ate nor bled for months, and everything everywhere was ours so I left the country, where finally, unbuffeted by visceral memory, I could simply mourn our cleaving.

So other than dog. So other than soul mate. So other than child-parent-beloved-friend.

Familiar spirit.

One being in two bodies, for twelve years.

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Yesterday I hiked Wendell State Forest, where hundreds of hours and miles of our laughter is imprinted in bark, water, sky, and springy pine-roots underfoot.

Last week I hiked the Emily Dickinson Trail, seeing the proud and happy flag of his tail just ahead in the purple grass.

In the weeks before that, mile upon mile around Quabbin, a thousand hours of his feet thundering, swimming, stalking interesting creatures, once being flattened by a golden eagle, another time finding whale bones in a shed.

Mount Orient. Norwottuck. Lake Pleasant. I’ve moved back home to my valley, where for so long his footprints everywhere glowed with knife-like clarity that sharpened me against my severed self:  now, these places are comforting and joyous. Layered rich with The Us I do not have to explain.

Finally, I don’t miss him: he just is, in me, again. Differently now, and it’s not as good, but he’s there; imprinted in every cell, muscle, timbre, laugh.

I walk both with and without him now. Shugorei, two steps behind and to the left: he’s there.

Herons. Bears. Minks. Otters. Beavers. Frogs. Turtles. Coyotes.

Images of him layered on my retinas, images of me in his tapetum, images of The Us reflected in every forest leaf-shimmer and water drop, in all this September gold.

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These lands know all his songs. Ella Fitzgerald’s Live in Rome 40th Birthday Concert. “Cheek to Cheek.” Sam Cooke’s greatest hits, of course especially “Cupid,” our running love-game, in which I faked my death from arrows and fell to the ground over and over, to be pounced and giggled. I can hear Us laughing.

These are good ghost walks.

Some loves are all comedy and tenderness. Some are the blood of life and death. Some are adventure. Some are all of those things. A vanishingly rare few are all that and more:

love that erases the boundaries between worlds.

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Gilgamesh.

August 13, 2001 – September 9, 2013

Forever, and gone.

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All the bears remember you in ursine story, handed down in hibernatory whispers. The earth still rises to meet your feet.

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