{54. eulogy}

03.           {6.21.2021}

So, this is how a eulogy is built and delayed, then reconstructed. A process developing over the last six months and stalled due to insistent pandemic, until the funeral, the laying to rest. Family gathering in the Oklahoma cemetery, myself lost in the motioning, the presence of the moment, the full experience opened, a blossom opened full moon, stray egret. A taking in, full inhalation under cypress trees. Firm understanding of self, history, folklore. Proof of the divine: a broken branch of wateroak in the middle of your path, mirrors tarnishing overnight, drone of cicadas out of season. 

I become the eulogy, the outpouring of language. 

•••••

•••••

First Paragraph, First Draft          {11.16.2020}  

Under the circumstances I have been motioning forward. Beyond the unexpected. The misplaced. The setbacks and little discrepancies of chosen ideas. The missing physicality of my father, his presence reduced to a furious loss: he was once an intelligent source of history, literature, language, and meteorology. Solid Texas Aggie through and through. Embodiment of diversity. My own sense of self continues, translating itself from moment to moment, recreating itself through metaphor—existing as an everchanging analogy, whereas my father translates to a static form, a state of permanence.  

His death therefore lies as an open wound; his death exists resisting vague attempts at resolution. His death, the steady presence of absence. His death, although an experience planned for, remains as of yet—

Oftentimes in fact I speak of him in present tense, existing in perceptions of the now, the day-to-day—

•••••

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”

― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking