Waiting for someone you love to die, I told a writer friend last week, is one of the circles of Hell. He said, “You should write about your view from the spiral because you will never be exactly there again.”

It is a monstrous eyewall, the inside of a spinning, screaming cone. Fat bands of thick cotton cloud, soft as mattress batting, circle between the black pit of truth below and the promise of light above, pulled taut. I ride this tornado - carried along with memories and bits of song, car parts and locks of curly hair, a bandana - and I wait for Time to say when and how it will end.

It began when the phone rang and news was delivered, bad news like a slammed door. My thoughts chased each other like dust devils and the air began to move. I whispered to myself, whispered his name and no, no, noooooo which became keening and then a wail that grew with the windspeed until I was held and lifted as it twisted, grew huge and howled on its own. We are all in it, Craig and everyone who loves him, waiting, riding the storm.

After a while you get used to the noise. It’s always there, thousands of voices saying death death and hundreds of people crying, overlapping songs - a din so loud it stops being words and notes and is just a pulsing shriek. The tornado is so big and spins so fast, we have crossed into motionlessness, held gently against the soft wall of a room with no floor - on an earth rotating around its polar axis and its sun, its Milky Way, between exploding stars and nebulae. We are in the fantastic.

How different time is for Craig and for me: he is waiting to die, to be released, expecting a heaven and radiance; I know only that he will be gone forever - his lanky body, his voice, his brown eyes, his answers. I squint up the eyewall at the future, trying to catch torn bits of Tarot cards, other clues, what?what? when?, pleading to the gauzy cloud; days and weeks are racing by - Thanksgiving, Christmas, a new January, his birthday is coming, oh god, oh no. He eats things he loves in small bites, tasting everything, sleeping slowly, being held, staying warm; every hour is a month, a year, every song an opera.

Imperceptibly we rise inside the cone, feeling the pressure lessen against our backs, in our ears. The eyewall widens and something beyond the distant edge is starting to glow; there is pale silver. When we reach the top, we will be flung like water drops from a twirling summer sprinkler, each of us on our own trajectory, a line that intersects a circle at one bright point.

Craig believes in the Christian god, in Jesus and salvation and life everlasting, not the medieval Catholic version that seems to involve penance and purgatory and working off one’s many sins and waiting in limbo for a promised reward many centuries or millenia in the future, oh no. He intends to be riding his ghostly motorcycle with Gary next summer and someday seeing his now-unconceived grandchildren with invisible tears in his invisible eyes. His body will be gone but he will be distinctly here, with us, still loving us.

I have no such faith. I believe the universe a dead person becomes an unseen part of is the same one she lived in with her breathing body, which for me is still a fine thing, a place with trees and rain and speckled rocks, the smell of fertile earth and rosemary, a sky the color of a cornflower, fat orange moons in October.

When we are flung, Craig will be gone and I will fly out of the Funnel Cloud of Craig’s Dying and back to my ordinary life at Casa de Swell, tending to Mr. Forte and the musky roses, and I will slowly begin to spend less time crying about losing my brother. The howling that hurts my ears will almost stop, and I’ll play his recording of Silver Blue someday. I’ll start thinking about how wonderful it was that we grew up together instead of how much I miss him.

Someday, maybe next year, I might look at the brilliant glitter spread across the night sky, like I did last night, and wonder how a star could burn so hot and look so cold, could be made of things as pedestrian as gas and dust. With my extraordinarily limited astronomy skills, I’ll find the three stars of Orion’s belt and watch them wink, and I will wonder if he’s out there, up there, part of the cosmic whirlwind. And maybe the breeze will sigh from behind my shoulder, just there, where a brother would stand.

Craig - Candace - mid 'seventies

 

 

 

 

 

 

This piece was originally published on my website and was there entitled "Turn Turn Turn." This week's posts can be found by clicking on Adobe Soup: the Unzipped Life of Candace Mann and scrolling down the home page. Thanks for reading - either here or there. Oh, and if OS won't let you comment here, you can leave a comment over there. :)