In a breeze, a memory found
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
I imagine 20 years or 40 or a lifetime later, a person driving by the spot where a loved one had died would slow down, look at the landscape and remember. That person might feel not the sharp pain of new loss, but the memory of sorrow.
The time might never come when that bend in the road, or that cross walk, or that grown over path, the place where life permanently changed, was simply another part of the road.
There's a telephone pole on North Main Street in Randolph that I drive by now and then. I was 13 when a boy in my neighborhood smashed his car into that pole. I hardly knew him. I can't picture him anymore. I don't even remember his name. And yet, I never pass the place where he died without thinking about him and remembering how he'd wave to me sometimes, without feeling sorry, still, for all he left behind.
It's the same with the house where my grandmother died. It has been painted and repainted many times since the fire that killed her 32 years ago. But I always turn and look at it as I drive by.
It's the same thing with seasons. You get to the place on the calendar where someone you loved died, and you feel it. You're back there, 10 years, 50 years, and in your head you're on the phone saying, "I'll see you tomorrow," still wishing you had known then that there would be no tomorrow. You're boomeranged across a thousand yesterdays, and you're saying: "Stay on the sidewalk. Don't go near the street," the accident a long time ago, but you're still trying to change what came next.
You don't expect to do this. The days go by and there you are marching on, driving on, eyes on the road in front of you, not in the rear-view mirror, and you're not thinking loss at all. You're thinking about taking the dog to the vet and where you could have put that overdue library book and what you're going to make for dinner. But then, just like a bend in the road, it's there.
It's in the lucid light of an October day, the car window open, the smell of wood smoke and fall and sudden loss. Or it's a rainstorm in November, the swollen clouds the dampness in the air, bringing back a distant day just like it.
For Anne, who lost her daughter in the spring, it's in the smell of new earth. For the parents who lost their teenage daughters last month in a car crash, it will always be in the sound of heavy rain.
"Every October chill sends a chill down my spine," says a friend who buried a son many Octobers ago. The world thinks she is long past grieving and sometimes she thinks she is past it, too. Until an October breeze brings her back.
"When someone leaves our life, they take some of us with them," a reader wrote early last spring. I have kept his letter close because this reader has become a friend, and this friend is old and wise. "It will be a year in April for my daughter. She comes back to me in so many ways. As a baby. As a school girl. As a young woman in love. A new mother. And lastly, as a no longer young and beautiful young woman who needed me at her side while she was suffering and dying I will never stop missing her."
Perhaps the mind, to ease the missing, allows us brief moments to glimpse what we had. I like to think this. I like to think that the death of a boy whose name I don't remember still matters. I like to believe that there will always be people who will pause at a bend in the road and recall three young schoolgirls who died far too soon.
"When someone leaves our life, they take some of us with them," my friend wrote.
And when people leave our lives, they leave part of themselves behind.
