Holes

My friend Matt…

was kind. I don’t know that I ever heard him say a bad word about anyone, even before he got sick. It was as if he already knew all the secrets that the universe reveals when someone learns they only have a few months to live. Like, that love is what’s most important; that the smallest acts of kindness matter; that there is too little time in this one wild and precious life for pettiness. 

Many years ago when I was a new attending in the emergency department and Matt was a fellow, we walked out to the parking lot together after an evening shift. When my car wouldn’t start, Matt drove me home, many miles out of his way, so that I wouldn’t have to call home and wake up my kids in the middle of the night for a ride from my husband. All of us have a story about Matt just like this because he lived life from a place of knowing what the next right thing was. It was instinct.

Matt died a few months ago. I hadn’t seen him in person for over a year before that. But now I see him everywhere. Not him, exactly, but where he should be. Missing him comes with this acute sense of panic when I remember he’s gone, kind of like the panic you feel when you’re digging in your bag for your wallet and you realize it’s not there. But Matt was a whole person, a whole life that was there and then wasn’t. 

He should be here. He should be at Leff’s having a beer, he should be at home hosting a crawfish boil, he should be watching his daughters dance and play soccer. He should be kissing his wife. He should be in the ED, taking care of patients. He should be waiting for us at the turn. 

“Hello, dear,” he would say.

“A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.” Andrea Gibson

My boys love to dig deep, deep holes in the sand. They will dig them deep enough for Nick, my youngest, to stand in; his head peeking out just above the rim. I like to watch their abandoned holes fill up with water as the waves inch closer up the shore, pushed by the incoming tide. The water pours into the well and is slowly absorbed by the sandy walls. Again and again, it fills up and empties. But with the waves come hundreds of thousands of grains of sand. The walls begin to soften and crumble and in time the hole is filled. 

Whatever times we have been living through of late have been riddled with deep caverns of loss. On most days I refuse to even look into these spaces, worried if I get too close, I’ll be sucked in. Or I desperately fill them with fear, with worry, and with despair just to preserve the illusion of wholeness. 

I am determined, however, to let the spaces that Matt’s death created sit empty for a while. I will let them fill slowly. And I will let love guide how they’re filled, just as the moon guides the tides. Just as Matt would ask us to.