Days of Clouds and Cold Earth

For my New Readers:

I put in some long, often tough days. I can deal with it a number of ways (1) humor, which helps, (2) bacon and a long conversation about anything but the day with my best friend or (3) writing about it. This post was from one of those days when (1) and (2) weren't going to cut it, but I hope it will explain why, on some days, life just shouldn't be trivialized with a joke.
Love- Brigid

The place was small and starting to show its age.

The town itself was nothing more than one small living plant among an acre of weeds, robbed of vitality by the economy, its young eaten by the big cities. As I draw nearer to this modest, neat farm, I notice all the homes around here empty, grass overgrowing. Two have faded Obama/Biden signs still withering in the wild lawn, others with some children's toys abandoned in the grass as they left in a hurry. I notice the small things, it's what I am trained to do.

A few hours after daylight, I approached the house, a cluster of pines shouldering the fence, drawing the whole walkway into darkness, while in the distance a dog barked futilely, without enough effort to scare away even a lone redhead. When I first pulled in, there was no movement, no light turning on, just the faint, cold and constant illumination of a cold morning. Then the small movement of a curtain, someone looking out.

They were waiting for me, looking out the front window at the sound of the vehicle. The people who lived here would look as if they'd been born there, with the home somehow built around them, bright eyes in parchment skin, hands roughened by a lifetime of hard work.

I stepped around a pile of wood outside the front steps, there with a sign "self service firewood" with a pot to put your money in and take what you needed. This is a home of people that trust.

I did not come for firewood. I came for something else, to be the confirmation of news would make any hardship they'd suffered in the past, pale in the light of something much worse. I would stay only as long as I had to, for there are always questions for which the answers I can not yet give. Questions that must be asked.

This is never easy. In my heart was a whirl of emotion, tears held in for too long, held in further. I wanted to look them in the eyes and just get it over with, but in an effort to get it together, I just looked past them, out into the acres of a life. Land that they held on for the sole purpose of leaving it to to family, looking into the bright comedy of late Fall that hid laughing beneath the dying green

But my face did not show this. My face showed only it's own pouched darkness beneath the eyes from being awake for 22 hours, mouth held firm as if by doing so I could hold in the words. But I can't.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

You hear the words on TV uttered by people like I, and no matter where it comes from, it sounds trite. Speaking of a person who's living face you've not seen, and whose name you only learned from a blackened piece of plastic, the words don't seem real. The words are hollow and spoken as if from a cue card. It's not what you wish you could say. For that would be words in which you could somehow articulate the encompassing sense of despair and anger, despair at the loss of someone whose remains forever fly upon the tragic and inescapable sky, his ruin. Anger because in another life, in another time, he might have been a neighbor, a lifetime friend.

There are never proper words, words themselves are deceiving. Taken out of context in a a journalists reports, a hastily written text or email, without the emotion or the eyes, truth becomes lies, and dreams the truth. Words are only that, words. Without the feelings behind them they are only inky blackness.

"I'm sorry for your loss". The wrong words, words that should have stayed on a page of a script, hidden from anyone other than their author.

I see it in their eyes, they know this as well, and surprisingly the man reaches out to grasp my hand, bearing stoically the fields of their devastation, reaching out to me in mine. It is not a handshake of welcome, for I am not, but it is a handshake that confirms we are alive, with duties that still must be done.


I am as brief as I can be, and leave them in their silence, the only sound an old retriever in his dog run, pacing on whispering soil, his ears bobbing as he goes to and fro, sensing as animals do, that something is irretrievably wrong.

There are no words for this either.

I back slowly out of the driveway, retreating like a glacier, leaving deep ruts in my wake, marks on a life that will be there til time ceases. Around me, farms, barns, fences, where people built and clawed and grew, raising families, doing what they could to hold back the wall of wilderness and death. Now it simply stands, cornfield skeletons, stark, broken, flowing away as I leave. Places that once seemed vastly impenetrable, diminish as the clouds weep, growing smaller and smaller, swallowed up by tears. I leave slowly and as quietly as possible, never looking back, because to do so would be to lose what semblance of control I still had.

As I leave, I look out across the way, to a vacant house, in which someones dreams were foreclosed. We go into life eyes open, running wild. We make it through our teen years, driving like idiots and taking inordinate chances. Still in our 20's we don't worry about financial loss, death or even taxes. We vote for the slickest campaign slogan, we scarf down food that's bad for us. We are still young, We have so much time left, the rest of our time, with years ahead, all pretty and shiny and new. We still have dreams. Of love and trust and living a wide open life that others will accept. We don't understand.

I didn't at first either, bounding into life and love with a pocket full of primers and a knife large enough for any bad news. There is nothing but being alive, in being in love, of buying that dream of believing in good. But with the years comes truth, and soon you know that life isn't always safe, and you take the risks, knowing in the risk that you are truly alive, to do what you are afraid of, to love strongly and free, is to be truly live.

It's better to be afraid than to cease to breathe.


Those of you that are young, when you are past 40, you will understand. Just like love, life is a risk, never a possession. With risk comes loss, with loss comes understanding. With understanding comes life.

So I go on back to do what I do, even if it comes with long hours, limited quality sleep and the concessional body bag. It's a full life, one that comes full circle even if I sometimes wish to get off the ride for a moment. At the end of the day I would leave behind the tools of my work, clothes discarded in bio hazard bags, whatever bright smile I had on my face as I started the week disposed of already. I hope those people are coping. For myself, I cope the best I can.

I've slept probably 7 hours in two days. I can't remember when I last saw a comb or my cherry lip gloss.

I look into the mirror, under harsh florescent lights, into green eyes that have seen much of human nature, need and frailty; Eyes that have sometimes seen too much to utter the words that come easily here.

I look at the reflection and speak to it ever so softly.

"I'm sorry for your loss."