Lost At Sea

I lit a candle at the service today for Eri – who commented here as Crowess.

The sea is so very big, and my boat is so very small.

— Eriol (@eriolcaw) December 27, 2019

I said I lost a friend suddenly, and I find myself contemplating euphemisms; on her blog, when I posted there to say she was gone, I used an Egyptian one, that she had turned her face to the beautiful West. I said she was brilliant – which she was – and often incomprehensible – which she also was.

She was going to write a book for me, and now she won’t, and I don’t know what I want to do about that. I don’t know any of the other people who knew the sorts of things she knew, or I’d wander through them and say, “Hey, you, can you write me a chapter about…” and I’d put together a memorial anthology. Maybe I will some day, when I have enough of a publishing company to make it look like a thing that I could maybe do.

I lit a candle, and I said my piece, and I went off to teach religious education. (That’s why I haven’t been writing commentary on sermons – I’ve been going to church but I haven’t actually seen a sermon in ages, I’ve been wrangling preteens. They go up on youtube and I need to get my brain sorted enough that I can, on the regular, watch them.)

And afterwards several people said they were sorry for my loss, several people offered me hugs.

And several people thanked me for the candle.

They didn’t know her; the general people in a standard little white New England church aren’t going to be hugely familiar with a Shakespeare professor in Texas, though I suspect my congregation is more likely to have overlap with a WMT mystic than many. But they thanked me for sharing my grief and shock. One of them said that it’s good to know what other people have to carry.

I’m thinking a lot about that, about the social nature of grieving and being together as humans, even as I’m full of inconceivably inexpressible emotions about all the rest of it.

I pray for the dead.

I give thanks for the living.