Dead Man Walking

It is surreal, this path I am walking.  I feel as if I have slipped down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality, a reality where all the colors are so vibrant they seem to be lit from within by flames, flames that simultaneously both consume in death while facilitating rebirth.  Juxtaposition in this realm are many dilapidated stone houses, miles from each other, each of which is covered by ancient weathered vines that have over a millennia adhered themselves to the rotting structures.  Most of their windows are broken and as the winds move through the tattered cloth coverings billow into spider web covered interiors filled with the discarded belongings of people who have disappeared during another age.  As I navigate the convoluted paths of this reality, the ones that snake from one house to another through forests that are thick and overgrown I know what my task will be.  When I arrive I am to search for my truth, for Home, knowing full well that I will find neither.  And as I leave the realization once again becomes clear, that no matter how hard I search I will never find my way back home.  With each step I take towards the next house I can feel the increasing weight of it all as it sets itself upon my shoulders like a stone yoke.  This is the nature of my grief.  Millennia old, aged by time and circumstance, multiplied by death upon death as the vines of which have become one, entangled within my soul.  I thought, maybe in truth, more likely within denial, that I was building a new relationship to my grief.  Nothing like the death of one's child to clear the senses.
I have said that I have walked this earth before.  Many times as far as I can tell.  New York City was one, Budapest another, London, Moscow, maybe Vienna.   I tested this once in the mid Nineties when I met my friend Diane in New York City.  It was my second trip there and we had just finished a wonderful meal on the Lower East Side.  As we walked out of the restaurant I said, "Let me show you where our subway stop is."  I had told Diane about my history so she readily agreed as she had grown up in New York City and knew it well.  As we walked snaking our way northwest I went directly to the subway stop some seven blocks away, the one that would take us back up to the Upper West Side where our hotel room was located.  I had felt the same sense of deja vu when I was in London and Budapest.  When I went back to New York City just after my father died three years ago I had that same feeling again.  I had been sick while I was there and was grateful for a night out.  I walked a few blocks over to a cinema to watch a movie with Judy Dench.  On the way back to my hotel I knew that I had walked that street many many times before.  Closely on its heels came the familiar refrain, that I will be forever destined to wander this earth without ever being able to go back from once I came.  I wept when I got back to my room, as much as for losing my father as it was for the pervasive feeling of Other that has dogged me for the whole of my life.  I suppose I am much like my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  Hers was much like the life I have had.  She communicated with the dead as I have.  She had experiences that could not be explained; except by her.  Once, she had had a "Visitor" who came to her when her first husband was at work one day.  The visitor taught her how to play the piano, the one that had sat in the parlor collecting dust for years. When her husband came home there she sat playing like she had been a accomplished pianist for the whole of her life.  Dumbfounded, he asked for an explanation and she told him what had happened.  He was so unsettled that soon after he filed for divorce.
My dad came to me many times after he had died, sometimes talking with me, others not.  Our last conversation was him asking me how it felt to not have parents.  I was taken aback by this question at first but then I understood.   My dad knew who I was but had lost the ability to speak to me from the perspective of being my father.  My mom visited me after her death but in a nefarious way.  She, like my paternal aunt Jeanette, turned on the high capacity burner on my stove but without the flame.  Crook came to me too, albeit briefly.  I only caught sight of him once as he made his way over to our favorite spot by the south face living room windows.  That was where we would lay on the floor cuddling as I sang good morning to him.  Larry has been around too. Just after I got home the day he died I had laid down in bed not knowing what else to do.  When I rolled onto my back I felt him jump up, one of his front paws landing on my leg.  Since then I have seen him a number of times.  When he came in from the bedroom I got down onto the floor as I always did greeting him.  When he passed by I felt him brush up against my right forearm.  I saw him going into the bathroom too.  I followed him in turning the bathtub spout on for him to drink from only to begin weeping as I sat on the edge of the tub. 
When I said that all things originated from Larry, that he ordered every facet of our existence together, I never realized how deeply ingrained that was.  Everything around me has his imprint on it and not just the obvious things that I recently alluded to in my previous blog.  Every cupboard, every closet, the cabinet under the bathroom sink; they are all his.  How I partially close the shower curtain, how I stack the prerinsed dishes in the drainer, when and in what order I wash the dishes at the end of the day; they are all his.  How I hang my clothes in both closets, how every closet is organized, where I store my gardening shoes, it even extends to how I shop for fruit and veg.  They are all his. 
I always knew where he was in the house. Whenever I left, came in, or moved about, I instinctively made visual contact and if I did not readily see him I would search for him finding him asleep on the perch in the bedroom closet, or curled up under the bed, or baking in the sauna.  He was my touchstone of unconditional love and seeing him brought me eminence comfort and joy.  Often I would walk over, lean in, and gently kiss him.  In response he would curl his head under, or stretch his legs, his whole body quivering, while settling back into a deep sleep.  Now however, when I turn to look for him he's not here.  When I stop at the door craning my neck back to say I love you as I'm leaving for work I realize he is no longer here.  When I open a closet door, or a drawer, or a cupboard he is there but not here.  As I move about my world all of these actions have become ticking emotional time bombs that can in an instant take me right back down onto my knees.  And as I descend to the floor, my head bowed, my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, tears streaming down my face I utter what have become familiar words in the wake of his death, "I can't do this without you."
I am a dead man walking, my Raison D'etre having been taken from me.  I've noticed that at times I have agonal breathing, that labored way in which a person breaths just before death.  I do not always realize I'm doing it but when I do I accept that that is where I happened to be in the moment.  Just as when my chest closes down because of my contracting muscles are tightening around my lungs, or when I feel the blood draining from my head, or I feel my body being drawn once again into the fetal position, I accept that is where I happen to be, that this is my insurmountable grief speaking its truth.