The number 8. If you flip it on its side, it makes the infinity sign.
Today is 8 years since you left us. At the time of writing, another great man is on the precipice of passing on. I feel that familiar keening all too everywhere at the moment. I’ll always – no matter what I do – connect that void-feeling to losing you…and somewhere, I feel that void turning around again for so many people. I wrote about it here.
That said, it is still 8 years since you left us.
About that infinity sign. In 8 years, I’ve come through a range of phases. I think I mentally denied your death for at least a year. For two years thereafter, I was sad. I was angry-sad. Skip forward to 5 years of you being gone, and mom had just joined you at the great dancehall in the sky…and I felt a weird peace. For at least a year, I would comfort myself with the idea that you two would be dancing and hugging and laughing and shouting and all the things I know you would do.
Somewhere, last year, right around the time that you celebrated your seventh year in the clouds, I felt you were continuing, yet gone. Does that make sense? It feels almost like I can hear the music of you playing, but I cannot see where it’s coming from. You’re an invisible sound that resonates in every area of my life. And no matter how much I wish you visible, and hunt for where your boombox is located, I know I will only find it within me.
So it is there that you rest, within me. As the invisible sound of my life, I find you every day.
In the year since I last wrote to you, I’ve scribbled some notes about the things you would have loved but never got to experience. I thought I’d just list them:
1. Glee. I think you would have LOVED Glee. I’d imagine it would have been one of those series we’d huddle around the telly for, drink tea and sing along to, loudly, and entirely out of tune.
2. Twitter. Oh my actual hat. You would have loved Twitter. 140 character pithy fights to out-pith each other (small joke here for my siblings – you’re pithed!…so are you!). By now, I imagine you’d have been the great granddaddy of Twitter, calling idiots out and making them substantiate their stuff. The times I’ve wished for you there are innumerable. Your concise yet cutting wit would have been an Internet Legend. I feel like the world’s missing that, sometimes. Maybe it’s just me, missing you there.
3. Reading. Dad, my baby is a reader, She loves books like you taught me to. She eats them up with her eyes and has an insatiable appetite for words. As I write this, she’s head down into a Roald Dahl. You missed these moments, but I hope you see them up close, because – of anything and everything that is in this life – that is where you reside.
4. My Family. There are these funny, noisy and messy people in my house who have somehow chosen me to be the person they love. As I mutter in the kitchen and they laugh raucously at someone’s fart joke or we’re all cuddled together giggling over something stupid, there’s a gap in the concert-like chaos where I wish I could hear your cackle. You, the invisible sound.
5. In the last year, the phrase “cool your jets” has meant more to me than ever before. I’ve learnt that Sunday mornings ARE for tea and pyjamas, not some mad rush around trying to do something. Bah humbug. In fact, cooling my jets is something I’ve become quite good at. I’d like to have you over for Sunday breakfast sometime – mail me and we’ll sort it out? Slippers compulsory and I’ll crack the eggs just like you taught me to and the kettle’s not broken, promise.
6. Yet throwing myself into things that mean something…something that makes me feel like I am creating a legacy you would have liked…this is where I have felt you most. In the writing, the word-wrangling and the far-too-hard keyboard bashing that has become not only my way of life, but the very thing that pays the bills. I miss being able to yell at you to go down the road and buy the latest magazine where my name appears, or compel you to click on the latest column. If there was one thing I know you would be proud of me for – because all the other stuff you would already believe I’d be fine at (yes, even parenting) – it is that.
7. Okay, this is lame but, the litany of incredible marriage proposals that have sprung up all over YouTube. You’d cry and laugh your way through these, and yell at me to come watch with you. You’d be stunned by the humanity, the creativity and the barefaced joy within these. This one is the one I know you’d love the most:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_v7QrIW0zY]
8. The nights I can’t sleep. There are fewer of them nowadays, don’t fret. But when they come, I wish I could text you and say “up for a Skype?” and we could chat and share interesting stuff on the Internet, or I’d get you to critique something, or you could regale me with some keyboard-bashing tale from when you were younger.
But, if you flip the number 8 on it’s side, it makes the infinity sign.
I miss you more than a simple 8 things, or the infinity beyond them.
But I know you are the invisible sound in the infinity of this life, and you live on far beyond any years you spent here.
Love,
Cathy.