Marigolds
by Lisa Moon-Zombie
I used to summer in my homeland, I loved the squeeze of humid air embracing me too tightly. When I was in the city, I traveled the same streets in heavy rotation, sometimes driving as slowly as 5mph, gazing out the window for a look at the child I used to be.
When life was particularly rough, I fantasized about the false ease of death, the cool allure of everlasting simplicity. I thought being a ghost would be a lot like the stillness of a day at the Quarry Hill makeshift hillside cemetery, where the sun hangs like a blister in the sky and paints the playground awash in color so bright your brain could delete all the chemical interferences that dull and dampen the world. There have been so many times in my life, particularly after 30, wherein I have wished to be at that picnic table, beside that swing set, gazing at that hill of meager headstones, home sweet home forever, in a place just outside of time.
How different my life had been before death, before the awful separation of life that made love so hard to come by, that made all the fear so big and prickly that eventually it just lived inside me, made my body a haunted house. I liked to park my car on 11th avenue, and follow the sodium lit sidewalks to Calvary Cemetery — here, I learned separation and all of its attendant anxieties. Here, among the labyrinthine path of chipping, weathered headstones, I learned the sober magic of loss. And it must have been here, this small plot of land at the foot of Dominic’s grave, here that I learned to grieve.
When my mother told me Dominic had died, I was transported to his darkened living room, his goldenrod curtains and his brown and orange furniture — I saw his camel-colored fedora and above me, his face, tender and soft with age and gently kissed by skin cancer. I saw a single band of light beam through his kitchen window and land squarely on the portrait of his wife, Clarice, seated on a tree stump, her feet crossed at the ankles over a pile of fallen leaves.
When Dominic passed, most took comfort in his being reunited with his long deceased wife. “He’s with Clarice now,” everyone said, but in the heart of the neighborhood, there was a hole.
Nostalgia is so slippery: when love has left this Earth, the universe knits itself around the loss — the magic of passing so great a force that to ever return to what was, what had been, cannot compare.
My father was on the louder side of angry in those days. The way it was, my mom was sick, and how it went, when he was alive, Dominic was a kind of hero — he was the knock at the door that stayed my father’s hand one more day, stilled the yelling, and brought the chaos back down from a boil to a simmer. Mom said, so sincerely, “Dominic was an angel,” and we three believed her, me and my brothers. We believed her because back then, we were all somewhat afraid of my father’s temper and sometimes that knock on the door made all the difference. To this day, when a man raises his voice or god forbid, a hand, my instinct is to look out the window, to watch for the shadow of Dominic’s fedora, and I wait on pins and needles for a knock that never comes.
I saw Dominic after the heart attack but only once, because I was young and everyone worried the children wouldn’t understand. There was a tube down his throat and he was trying to speak around it. Half the neighborhood must have been in that hospital room, and the other half down the hall waiting their turn. We took turns holding his hand. He strained against the wires and tubes plugged into him like a socket. My dad, his voice suddenly sweet and warm, said “Don’t try to talk, just squeeze our hands — we know you love us.” And from there, the memory falls apart like a toddler’s hands tearing at a 1000+ piece jigsaw puzzle, just destructive and entirely without reverence — gone.
It becomes less about the love between me and my magical neighborhood Grandpa, the man who fed me graham crackers and watched Mr. Rogers with me, the man who held me at my very baptism — and instead it becomes the ordinary and terrible story of the first death to ever touch my life.
I don’t remember being comforted by receiving ordinary, run of the mill comfort. The phrases, “It will be okay,” or “It’s okay,” or “It’s gonna be alright,” were everywhere back then and they meant nothing to me. Do we still use that language? Or was that just the lazy way we dealt with children processing a new reality that stealthily replaced an old familiar one overnight?
I remember mostly the loneliness of grief, and the shame of it somehow- I was embarrassed by my pain, even at 7 years old. I could not stand how much I hurt, and I couldn’t talk about it, either. From what I recall, no one wanted to anyway. The shame of that first death, of being told Dominic was gone so bluntly, and then reminded (almost instantly)that he wasn’t coming back, the memory of beginning to cry so openly and uncontrollably, and then… nothing. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know what came next.
My friend Alyssa’s mother, Peggy, who also lived in the neighborhood, suggested we all write letters to Dominic, and place them in his coat pockets at the wake. I marvel today at the brilliance of this suggestion, the health of it, ask myself why my own mother did not come up with it, though I already know what approximates an answer.
I wrote my letter on loose leaf paper in lime green crayon, the script so pale it was almost unreadable. There, I told him I love him, that I’m going to miss him so much, all my life — which was oddly true, and remains true, decades into my time on Earth. I think in the letter, I apologized too, for not being able to say goodbye. I told him I wished I could hug him one more time, though I knew, in the way I have always known, one more time would never be enough for me.
They lowered my neighbor (Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be — ) into the snow and afterward I was surprised by the way grief lingers at the edges of everything even though the ceremony is over. It was in the snow at my feet, and then at the space between my wrists and my mittens as I rolled some awful, misshapen snow man together in silence with my brothers. It soaked into my socks, and my fingertips, until I was cold everywhere. I would grow up to remember this chill and it would prompt a keen, agonizing awareness of hearts as the ticking clocks within the people that love me, and this is a fear I will never outgrow.
Life, of course, continues.
There was one particularly beautiful day in which the snow had finally vanished, giving way to a very deep spring evening — Rain showers dissipated and left the sky stained orange, yellow and pink, the pinkest blush sky you’d ever seen. Alyssa and I were in the wet grass playing with our dollies and Peggy, who knew on such days we were thinking of Dominic and his flowerbeds full of marigolds, Peggy taught us about the magic of grief.
Dominic was in a place that might be Heaven, she told us. We would, in fact, see him again one day, beyond the valley and behind the sun —in the place where angels go to feather their wings. She could not have been much older than I am now, coming up with this concrete language to weave a very abstract story for two little girls wrestling with the possibility of the hereafter. The sky was achingly vibrant — all the world consumed by the weight of that rose gold sunset. You won’t see him but he’ll see you, she said. He will watch you grow up. And somehow, that promise brought us peace.
What once had been a difficult memory, an open wound, transformed into something much more lovely than pain. Dominic’s love was close, just out of reach, but forever present. And always he would be waiting in the wings with an armful of flowers for when our curtains someday closed. I didn’t know it then, and I’m sure Peggy doesn’t know it now, but she was the answer I needed.
As the night falls and closes in around me, I trace my fingers along the groove of Dominic’s headstone. And I know that in death, just as in life, we are rewritten — over and over and over again. Our story becomes part legend, part lore, and there are a handful of people that we touched who refuse to ever us let us go.
And the living?
We are our loneliness, our terror, we are our own black holes. We are all walking hearts that contain just so many beats. But more than that, we are also our disarming imagination; we are the stories we need to stay alive in a world that so indiscriminately steals living love from us. And so it is written that we are the promises we make and moreover, the promises we keep.
Blooming wherever we are, over and over and again.
