reading when i can

Mis recuerdos no tienen color en los días de muerte.

Tu linaje es el sueño el resplandor la pesadilla.

Grief is actually egocentric, grief for oneself in an abandoned world. How will I live without… But this is only part of the story, only one side of the leave-taking.

I keep taking photos of wilting flowers, in various stages of drooping, fading, of their falling petals, starkly exposed pistil and stamens, already senescent, having outlived their seductive function. Blighted and dying flowers… There is a strange sorrow and beauty in their wilting, without the despair that accompanies the ageing of people and animals. This is surely the reason I continue to snap pictures of dying roses, periwinkles, tulips, balding peonies, dwindling calla lilies and violets… Botany knows how to die beautifully, without really dying. Botany still knows more about death.

I am convinced a child’s eye has the ability to expand space. When you are as tall as roses and tulips, you look at the world up close, you are at its eye level, and it’s at yours. Growing up distances and diminishes.

This’ll be a long sorrow, a friend says. It’s a pretty phrase, but I’m still deep in the midst of pain. First comes a long pain. The sorrow comes after…

It is harder to write about fathers. Perhaps this is because an invisible umbilical cord to the mother remains intact throughout our childhoods: she is somewhere near you, she makes your lunch, she takes care of you when you’re sick, puts her hand on your forehead, she is the air you swim in. The father is a different sort of presence—shadowy, mysterious, sometimes frightening, often absent—clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette, he swims in other waters and clouds.

The idea of resurrection is, I think, a botanical idea. This is where the allegory came from, that’s what started it. Immortality is also a botanical concept. All plants, which we view as less evolved than us, actually know one more miracle than we do, they have one more superpower. They know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.

After death, the telephone is a source of metaphysical horror.

It appears that after every death, just as after every birth, the world begins anew. Our personal chronicles change after such events, opening up new eras. You start saying, Ah yes, that was before my father died. Or while my father was still alive. Or two years after… That’s how it was when my daughter was born. The world divided sharply in two—before the common (or the child’s) era and after that.

Happiness lasts only a short time, like the narcissus and toadflax that quickly bloomed and faded away that same spring. Sorrow lasts for a long time, like those stubborn weeds that choke everything and which never let up, as my father always said.

Why does no one teach us what to do with the deaths of others? Why does no one teach us how to die, how we should die?

Sometimes I think pain—physical pain in particular—is sent to ease our separation with the world. To prevent us thinking about the most fearsome thing in those frightful hours.

You always imagine that in the final days of life you will utter the wisest words, you will leave your legacy, you will talk about the very essence of things… But the pain sweeps away everything.

What do we talk about when we talk about death? About life, of course, about its whole enchanting ephemerality.

What do we talk about when we talk about death? Are we talking about the person who is absent, or about ourselves? Or are we talking about absence itself?