Lockerbie - A Reminder

On the news this morning, more on the Lockerbie bomber. I'm not sure which makes me more angry, that experts announced, that after his hero's welcome after his "compassionate" release, that he really isn't on the edge of death, and may live at least ten more years and there really wasn't any hard evidence that he was dying when he was released. Or that he now continues to show up in public TWO YEARS LATER, now at a rally to support Gadafi.

I sit in safety, warm and peaceful, and though I may complain about long weeks, nights often spent in the wet and iron chill of the places in which I sometimes make my living, I have much to be grateful for. A career that's a steady challenge, people who mean the absolute world to me, and around me, photos of family and a life well lived.

After a disaster such as that you see the pictures in the paper, the photos of the dead, strangers, stand out in relief to the pictures of the familiar. Strangers, yet all dear to someone.

In my mind those pictures of lives left unlived, mix in with the the pictures of the life I was fortunate enough to have experienced. There's foreign ports, and distant mountains, and a blur of days that run into the setting sun. I look down at the photos and see the last 40 or so years as a bystander to my own life. It is like drifting along the river on a boat, floating effortlessly and without volition upon moving waters as your life goes past, those years in which your youth vanished. Years you never appreciated until they were past. Years for reckless adventures, for daring launches into the blue, for growing old, yet never truly growing up. Time for finding yourself, finding the wild and ephemeral blush of love, that knows no age, innocent, fumbling and breathless. All too soon to be reduced to small, worn squares of color held in a shoe box, of fading faces and edgeless shapes that will inhabit the memory and not the flesh.


But still, though past, a life lived. Something the victims of Flight 103 were denied. A chance to live life fully, to laugh, cry, and leave their mark. The opportunity to die on their own terms, with dignity and surrounded by those they loved.

When my Mom died, I was filled with anger for her leaving us so quickly, but I was also filled with respect. Respect for her ability to chose her final days; to unplug the plugs and unhook the machines and even though in pain, to be with her family, cohesive, intact. She achieved what Richard Hugo wrote about in one of his last poems,"Death in the Aquarium."

Where should we die, given a choice?
In a hothouse. Along a remote seldom traveled dirt road?
Isn't some part of that unidentified man in us all,
that wants to die where we started?

I give one last look at the newspaper images I kept, of other disasters. Some were no more than scraps of history. Some had more personal memories, that seared into my soul, to return on late introspective nights. There are memories there and many photos. Of dust and disintegration, shattered lives intertwined with broken wreckage, of unseen footprints in the debris of the living, stepping from the ash on their way home, and the seen footprints of those that respond, tending those taken from us.

I have been through bereavement, of things lost, hearts wrenched away without reason. I'd not be honest if I said it doesn't follow me as I knock on a door, tiptoe into a hospital room to ask questions I wish could be left unsaid; hours spend in laborious reconstruction, to seek closure. Because of it, I know what we once were, and where we all will be. Because of death I know what I can be, what each moment that is the immortality of all that the flesh could desire and the mind is capable of, truly is. Every breath a gift, each moment, mine with God's grace, but MINE, to live as I choose, and as fully as possible, as only a wild heart can.

Life is not fair and nature and fate sometimes knocks when we'd rather not answer. But to have the very breath of what we are taken away in a deliberate act of violence is a sacrilege, not something to be be flaunted in public like a celebration. We should remember rather, the tragic mute bones that could have withstood anything life threw their way, if only left upright and undisturbed.

This morning, I will turn off the TV to the reminder of the travesty which was a decision made. Today there will be only a moment of respect for those souls that seemed to have been forgotten by one court's decision. A moment in which I will look skyward, wishing their souls godspeed as the light vanishes with a soft sigh, driving down for only a moment upon the musty smell of slain flowers, there in a vase. Flowers taken from gardens for so many reasons, for love, for loss, for the dead, now dying themselves.

As I look to an uncaring sky, I grieve for the way they left us, as much as the why. I grieve for a world that gives succor to terrorists and those that recognize with honor a man who may well have stolen all that could be, from them.