Ben and Beyond

I’ve just come inside from harvesting strawberries in the back yard and all the time I was filling my bucket I wished I could write and work in the garden at the same time. Out there the air is charged with motion and life. Out there the wind is gusting and the fledgling eagles are screeching for their parents. Out there the onion bulbs are swelling and garlic scapes are curling and the scent of chamomile lingers in the air. Out there everything I wish to articulate in my writing comes to me clearly, easily, in an instant, and I always wish I could capture it.

Today if I could have written while I was picking berries I would have written about my friend Ben who died in July just short of his 42^nd birthday. Ben was in my cohort in graduate school and the nature of the program, which brought us all together on campus for four summers in a row, allowed a few of us to form fast and lasting friendships.

Unlikely friendships are often the ones that give us a window into sides of ourselves that would likely have gone unknown. Those of us in the fiction cohort challenged each other in our thinking and our writing, and we got to know each other outside of our day to day lives. With Ben and Dan and Nick I was just Teresa. Not the person who worked at the Homer library, or Dean’s spouse, or Dillon and Adella’s mom. It was refreshing to be known differently like that, and it changed the way I defined myself.

When I first met Ben he was becoming a Catholic. One night over dorm room beers Dan and I tried to get Ben to explain why he felt compelled to convert, especially in light of the abuse within the church, and Ben couldn’t really give an answer. He said something about ritual and beauty. He mentioned his dad, who’d also been Catholic. Really though, he didn’t know why he needed to become a Catholic, it was just the way he needed to go.

Since that dorm room conversation over a decade ago, my own ideas about God have evolved. Before when I looked for some kind of evidence of the Divine, I couldn’t see it. Now I see evidence everywhere. That change didn’t happen overnight and it’s not something that can easily be explained. I guess that might have been the way Ben felt when he tried to explain his reasons for converting to Catholicism. It was personal.

The day before I found out Ben was in the hospital, I felt that it was important for me to call him. I was busy though, with all of my work, and I didn’t follow through. It nagged at me in a way that felt urgent, and now, in hindsight, I know that day was the day Ben reached his lowest point. Up until then he put people off when they asked him to seek help. He thought he had a handle on his situation. But on that Thursday Ben knew it was time. Maybe even past time. He told me later that he stopped off at confession that same day.

I’ve lost people I’ve cared about, but something about Ben’s death feels different. His death was tragic, but also not entirely unexpected. I grieve for his sons who will go through life with just a memory of their father. I grieve for the fact that he’ll never come down for a weekend stay in our yurt again. I grieve for the books and short stories and blog posts he won’t write. And I grieve for Alive Ben, whose life was heavy in ways and for reasons I’ll never fully understand. But alongside the grief I have over Ben’s death, there’s a sliver of relief that he’s not carrying the weight of it all any longer. It wasn’t easy being Ben.

As I’m writing this I’m looking out the window at the weather to see if I should get back out there to resume all the chores I hoped to get done this weekend. The way the rain starts and stops, the way the clouds roll overhead exposing patches of blue, the way that summer’s on its way out even as it just now feels like it’s getting started, I find that this grief is always in motion. It’s mixed in with other losses, some more personal than this one, some that came before and some that have come after. It’s a small grief within the bigger Grief that’s been with us and will always be with us.

Every day there is more to grieve. This week a long-anticipated visit from a friend fell through when her travel visa was canceled abruptly before she boarded the plane to Alaska. For a neighbor it’s the loss of a much-loved birch tree that her children used to climb. And then there’s Lahaina. So many lives lost and so much history destroyed.

There’s also preemptive grief, like knowing our old dog Ripple is reaching the end of her life span, like knowing an undeveloped piece of land is about to be developed.

Sometimes beauty alone is cause for grief because it’s all fleeting. We grow old. Cities burn. Civilizations come and go. Species go extinct. It’s a lot to carry.

It’s tempting to try to avoid grief by limiting how much we love, by closing our hearts, by becoming cynical and jaded. Or we numb ourselves. Those seem like viable options given how much life hurts sometimes, and every person has to make their own choice as how they’re going to keep going, or whether they’re going to keep going.

Out in the strawberry patch I thought about how grief feels lighter when I put it in the perspective of infinity, when I imagine that this life is a part of something far beyond anything I can truly conceptualize. So vast, so eternal that every experience belongs and is held without judgment, where there’s enough time and enough space for all of our burdens, our quirks, our mistakes.

Within infinity everything is dispersed through time and space, making it all small, nearly weightless. And what is the manifestation of Love if not the lightening of our loads, both individually and collectively?

Who really knows? All I know is that each year the seasons come and go and I’m only here for a limited number of them. Right now it’s the season for harvesting and I should get back out to the garden. This year the strawberries are plump from the early rains and sweet from the late summer sun. It would be a shame to miss them.