September 13: "Building with Its Face Blown Off," Aunt Marian, Joy and Grief

When looking on a scene of devastation--say a car accident or burned building--I always find myself meditating on the victims and their lives.  How they probably woke up in the morning, just like me, thinking it was going to be a normal day.  Maybe they had oatmeal for breakfast and were planning on returning some books to the library on their way home from work.  Perhaps they made dinner plans with some friends.  Ordinary, boring, everyday stuff.

Until it's not.

Billy Collins writes about heartbreak and loss . . .

Building with Its Face Blown Off

by: Billy Collins

How suddenly the private
is revealed in a bombed-out city,
how the blue and white striped wallpaper

of a second story bedroom is now
exposed to the lightly falling snow
as if the room had answered the explosion

wearing only its striped pajamas.
Some neighbors and soldiers
poke around in the rubble below

and stare up at the hanging staircase,
the portrait of a grandfather,
a door dangling from a single hinge.

And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed
by its uncovered ochre walls,
the twisted mess of its plumbing,

the sink sinking to its knees,
the ripped shower curtain,
the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

It’s like a dollhouse view
as if a child on its knees could reach in
and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.

Or it might be a room on a stage
in a play with no characters,
no dialogue or audience,

no beginning, middle and end-
just the broken furniture in the street,
a shoe among the cinder blocks,

a light snow still falling
on a distant steeple, and people
crossing a bridge that still stands.

And beyond that- crows in a tree,
the statue of a leader on a horse,
and clouds that look like smoke,

and even farther on, in another country
on a blanket under a shade tree,
a man pouring wine into two glasses

and a woman sliding out
the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper
filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.

Billy Collins captures the two sides of tragedy pretty well in this poem.  While he's anatomizing the site of the bombed-out building, a man and woman in another country are sitting down for a romantic picnic.  Life just goes on.

My day was pretty normal.  I worked at the library, worked on my Bigfoot manuscript some, and picked up Border Grill for dinner on the way home.  My wife and I watched an episode of The Crown.  As I was leaving the house to take my puppy for a walk, I got a text from my sister, informing me that our Aunt Marian, my mother's youngest sister, had just died.

I can't say that I was shocked by the news.  A little over a week ago, she suffered a stroke, and then, while she was in the hospital for treatment, the doctors discovered that her body was full of metastatic cancer.  There was really nothing that could be done for her.

Suddenly, my boring evening became a building with its face blown off, if you get my meaning.  For the last few hours, all I've been thinking about is my aunt and what a wonderful, loving person she was.  One of my most vivid memories of her is from a New Year's Eve party at my parents' house, all of us sitting around the dining room table, playing board games into the wee hours of January 1st.  And then I thought of her at home this evening, in bed, breathing those agonal breaths.

Poet Mary Oliver once wrote this:

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.

What a time they have, these two

housed as they are in the same body.

Tonight, Saint Marty is shaking with joy and grief, giving thanks for his Aunt Marian, mourning her loss.