EXORCISM

 

K. Cronick

So many people that I have known have died recently. Of course, this comes with age, my generation is dying off.

My grandparents's pictures hang in the hallway outside my bedroom. I sometimes greet them, and ask them how they are. I know about their stories and have the feeling they look out through their photographs, like windows through lost times.

Those I have cared for, and who have preceeded me come to sit with me. I usually know who they are because their relatives, or Facebook has informed me of their going. Ligia left me with a sense of unnecessary loss, years of surviving a stroke, that took away her expressiveness. Most of these losses come with deep emotions, some of them sad like when Isis or Vladimir came to lament the hurt of their long, debilitating illnesses. Isis sat with me in my living room, her emotions were a mix of the cost inflicted by her last years of cognitive decline, and the creative sweetness that marked her whole life.

Sebastián was different. There was, yes, a feeling of loss, but his memory has played with me, for years. There were the colored balloons that danced in the wind of the abandoned patio in the school where I would wait for my neighbors to help me with the week’s groceries. I would stand up, walk with my cane to play with the balloons (him), like a gentle soccer training session. There was the giant rainbow across the valley. There was the shadow of the giant bird on the ceiling when I was visiting Bogota. There were the flowers that bloomed out-of-season commemorating the day he died. In Sebastián’s presence there has been sweetness, playfulness, laughter, and deep regret, too.  

When my mother died, I just cried. I was there and had held her in her last moments, so it wasn’t necessary for her to come “visit”. But then, some years later, on the day of my 70^th birthday, she sent a bright flash of light to my hallway in San Antonio de los Altos, and a deeply present, profound, but not sad company that lasted all day long. Years before, after my brother’s funeral, I was walking along Florida's Intercoastal Waterway with his widow and my mother. It was sunset and suddenly all the windows on the eastern side of the channel lit up with a golden blaze, and hundreds a fish swam up to the water´s edge on the western bank where we were standing. We stopped, and we said goodbye.

When Ligia and Euclides died, there were also no visits. But I have thought about them so often. Both were fundamental in my professional life, in very different ways. They are alive in what I write now, and I consult with them in every new project. They are fixed shadows on my library walls.  

The day before yesterday a deep sadness, and emptiness came to sit with me. I knew it was someone who had just died, but I didn’t know who. I asked, who are you? I didn’t know until the next day that it was Manuel, my gardener and neighbor, the gentle presence that has fixed my broken doors and damaged water pipes for forty years. He died far away, fortunately in the presence of his extended family; in his last days he was cared for, and there he is mourned. But somehow the depth of the sadness that came to sit at my table last Saturday night has unnerved me, and made me write this exorcism.