Never the Same Again

I lost a close family friend last week. His name was Bernie. He was ninety. His children are in their sixties, his grandchildren in their twenties. He lived out the limit of his days surrounded by love and died at home with his wife beside him. It was, I suppose, the best end one could hope for.

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Do not stand by my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I’ve been a chosen member of this family for four decades. My parents and I have shared in their Passover seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners and dozens of other meals and events and celebrations. We’ve laughed and joked and sung together, rejoiced together, argued together. I held all four of the grandchildren when they were babies. I watched them grow up, as their parents and grandparents watched me.

My own grandfather died when I was nineteen. He came home from the hospital after undergoing lung cancer surgery and a few days later he went to sleep and didn’t get up again. When my father woke me early that morning with the news, I distinctly remember thinking, Nothing will ever be the same again.

And it wasn’t. My family changed. New traditions and habits formed, new occasions were celebrated, my grandmother lived for a further eleven years—but we were never quite the same. Even at a full table, there was always an absence.

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I am the thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints in snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.

Bernie’s family stood by my mother and me when my father died in 2018. Last Sunday I stood by them as they buried him. And because life is strange and wondrous and terrible, he was buried next to my father.

I hadn’t visited my father’s grave in over seven years. I’ve never felt that he’s there, so it seems pointless to go. When I want to visit him, I walk into his office in the house I grew up in, where my mother still lives, and I sit on the couch across from his desk, and I picture him sitting in the chair there, wearing a teal fleece and black sweatpants and white socks and tan slippers, beaming at me as he always did, and I say “Hi Dad,” and I hear him say “Hi sweetie,” and sometimes I cry and sometimes I smile but I always feel that’s where he is, not in a graveyard two towns away but in the house where he lived for thirty years, the house where sometimes lights turn on when they shouldn’t and closet doors are found open when they were closed.

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As you awake with morning’s hush
I am the swift, up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight,
I am the day transcending night.

Bernie’s daughter noticed my father’s adjacent grave first, as we stood in the cemetery awaiting the burial. I heard her gasp, and she looked at me, and as we both started crying she said “They’ll be good neighbors,” and then suddenly seven or eight of us were standing there with our arms around each other crying and looking at the new grave and the old one and the huge mound of soil between them, and I felt the beauty of the love of this family, and then I heard the first scoop of dirt hit the coffin and in my mind it was eight years ago and we were burying my father and nothing, nothing, would ever be the same again.

But Bernie lived a long and lovely life. And when I shut my eyes after shoveling three handfuls of dirt into the ground, I felt my father there beside me, standing ramrod straight, welcoming his friend and helping us bury him. And I left a stone on my father’s grave, as our tradition dictates. And then with fresh mud on my boots I left the cemetery and boarded a train and went back to my life, to the new joys and the old frustrations and the ever-changing landscape of this strange, wondrous, terrible world.

And nothing will ever be the same again. But then, nothing ever is.

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Do not stand by my grave and cry—
I am not there; I did not die.

[Poem by Clare Harner, 1934]