From the Quill: The Gulf Between

As a bit of a follow-on to an earlier post, where I offered up a rather stinky piece of... uh, fiction, that I'd written back in 1981, here's something I wrote just over a year ago. There's no title; it simply came out of meditations, late at night, on what the Purgatory experience might be like. As always, the words simply flowed, with little or no need to change any of them.

 

In this piece, I know I'm internalizing — still — the sudden death of my father, and wondering also how my children (and I) will deal with my own death.

 

I've not given up any hopes in this one, so please save it for me to give it a chance in a larger work, okay? It'll be tough to write, yes, but I have some ideas…

 

At some point I'd become consciously aware that he was back with me. "Yes?

 

"Stephen. There's someone thinking about you again. You'll want to" – he glanced around momentarily at my bare walls – "to have a look at what she's feeling."

 

My calmness didn't thin… yet I could almost hear the soft, rising undertone of a waxing, slight loneliness in the tuned instrument that was my soul. My voice (I assume it was my voice; some days I was less than sure) was more upbeat than beat up: "Sure; why not." I made to rise, and paused. "How long now since someone's heart or memory was feeling around for me?"

 

His eyes reminded me I'd asked this quite a few times before. Yet he was patient. "That last time" (which I could believe I dimly recalled) "was a few months from now." Patient.

 

"Why can't things be linear and sequential anymore?" We rose.

 

He said, " Stephen, there is no time anymore." I thought for a moment he meant that we couldn't discuss this any further. But he went on: "I know you don't understand, because all you've known thus far has been a march, a progression: yesterday, today, tomorrow. This hour, that moment, a couple seconds. There is only now."

 

I shrugged. "How else?"

 

He said, "This is her thought of you." The explanation had been set aside:

 

Even after most of a year, I suddenly find an idea I want to mention in my next letter/card to you, or maybe I can call you from work. You call me, too – and even though I don't very often tell you I love you, I know you can hear it in my voice; if we get together for lunch again, I know my eyes will tell you.

 

But there aren't going to be any more lunches; nothing funny again from you, no more mid-day calls to your aging house. But you know, your voice is as clear to me as though you've just spoken, and as always I remember how I feel in your arms. There is heartstring sewn to diaphragm, which rumbles – rumbled – in sympathy at the well-deep that your voice was. Is? Is in my heart, on my heart-string and under my sternum right now. At least, it remembers; and your forever-silent voice hasn't stopped vibrating where I can feel it.

 

There's this guy down the hall – maybe I mentioned him in an earlier call? – who almost has your voice, if he'd space out his words a little, and be a bit more confident. I hear him every now and then when you're the farthest thing from my mind – and it's as if you've stuck your head in my door again. "Two for coffee?" Sure; when is good for you?

 

But the door is staying closed; and the fact that you'll never open it again is far less real to me than the feel that's still there between my shoulder blades, under this hair (like Mom's) where you pat me (used to) when I'd come to you crying.

 

It's wrong – not just that I can't talk to you or see you, or even that that guy has a counterfeit of your voice, but that he doesn't remember holding me on his lap, then suddenly slipping his legs open (or getting up to catch the phone) to dump me with a yelp on the floor.

 

I love you. Can you hear me this time?

 

"Where is all this coming from? I can hear her voice, so I know she's right here (wherever that is), but there's only the outline and shade where I know I should be seeing… daughter, right?"

 

"As your heart knows well, Stephen." His voice whispered a patience that rang in harmony with my own. "She has always worn your artist's eye and poet's quill quite well. All your days you carried more word and image in your heart than could ever flow over canvas and onto page; all parents microcosm themselves into their children. And so there is far more within her than without."

 

I felt his hand take mine. We were back in my… room? "Unhindered by distraction, called not aside by ache or duty, you have again heard in full the fleeting thought that rested an instant on her soul at the unprompted thought of you. From her weak perspective, this was barely a moment's passing ache. But could she have put words and color on it, you would have heard it so. You have heard it so. And she might believe that for a tiny span she filled the gulf she fears separates you."

 

There is no gulf, I realized, and said as much. I went on, "Will you tell me the next time someone" – I tasted the word, but it still fell short of palatability – "misses me?"

 

There was a smile shed on me like late-winter sunlight on early blooms. "You won't always need telling. Trust in your prayers, their efficacy. As you draw further from her, and the rest of your family and circle of beloved, you'll recognize" (I had already, but why interrupt one such as he?) "there is no gap surrounding or between you. You see, you'll be touching them always."

 

And in the instant he allowed this smile that was more in feel than on face, he was gone again. Ever-living Father, I thought/prayed, have utmost mercy on that young one, who has more of my heart's flesh within her than has ever beat in my chest, O Lord.