Listen to Big Feels on Spotify, cuties.
Big Feels on an Epitaph:
I hated to be left out when I was growing up (I hate it now). I’m sure that’s how I ended up on my first gopher hunting trip. Of course, I use the word “trip” loosely. My dad, my older brother, and I drove down a few gravel roads, rested our ‘22s on a wooden fence, and took our best shots for an afternoon.
I remember my first dead gopher.
(Did I shoot it? Did I cry out? I don’t know. I can see the chest ripped open, I can see the heart beating wildly, I can see the eyes open and searching.)
I was nine or ten. I remember the feeling of not knowing what I had signed up for; the feeling of getting in way too deep, way too fast. I hadn’t imagined a heart still beating, exposed to the air, as it was dying. I remember the breath caught in my throat.
I mostly went hunting alone after that (and by hunting, I mean gophers and dandelion heads). It becomes easier with practice; the shooting, the watching someone/something dying.
I’m reformed now, of course; but I’ve been thinking of dead gophers again. I tell my friends that my heart is roadkill: a gopher, limbs and organs stretched and spread thin, drying up, barely resembling its original form.
I separated from my long term partner (Did I shoot it? Did I cry out?). Okay, we decided to separate. He came up behind me and showed me how to aim, then I pulled the trigger.
He has hurt me deeply
and he knows it
and I love him
of course I do
and he loves me
and still
I had to leave
still
he had to leave
and so it goes
not a decade, but close enough
not a dream, but something that kept me up at night.
How strange it is to be told that we must stop loving someone when we let them go.
I am prompted to say here, “often the most loving thing is to let go.”
I don’t want to say that.
Not that it’s not true. It is true. So is, too, that the most loving thing can be to hang on; it can be to try again; it can be to hope; it can be to hear the words that have been said a hundred times and to finally hear them like it is the first time. To love is to change. To love is to allow change. To love is to acknowledge change. bell hooks defines love (by way of M. Scott Peck’s definition in The Road Less Traveled) as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
He says, “We loved each other as best as we could, for as long as we could.”
We both had parting gifts to share. Mine was a home no longer kept in my heart, but given to him to keep with him always. His was to offer me an ending that felt gentle enough to hold a beginning.
There have been a lot of deaths and a lot of endings that have marked the passage of time for me. I’ve been asking for a long time: can things end without everything being burned down in the funeral pyre?
It turns out they can (sometimes).
We laid beside each other in the king bed we impulse bought in our first year (after too many nights sweaty on a futon mattress). He started to apologize, but I heard the sorries when he said them all the other times. I asked him if we could talk about the good instead (I am tired of adding fuel to the fire).
So we listed:
late nights talking, giggling, sharing jokes and secrets, past our bedtime.
when he built us a beautiful cedar a-frame that perched on the back of his truck (for camping) and the nights spent cozy in there.
ongoing jokes about pasta names: he would list them, I would guess which ones were real or which ones were not.
getting dressed to the nines and going out on the town together.
valentine’s day parties with precious nieces, nephews, and niblings.
that one time we spent all afternoon watching The Great Canadian Baking Show until we couldn’t bear it and had to drive to the bakery on the other side of town in the dead of winter to buy macarons in the dumbest toques we owned (his swallowed his head, mine flopped down like a deflated balloon); how hard we laughed when the bakery lady said, “Nice toques!”
holding hands for the first time
and when I would sing while he was in the house, listening
and every meal he ever made
and every time we scream-sang “I Slept with All Your Mothers” by Harriet at the top of our lungs while driving in the car.
There was more good. There will be more good. It did not outweigh the hard, but it was true and it was there and it was real. It still is.
It feels good to be hunting alone again. Death (of anybody/anything) is scary and vast and takes your breath away. I am a heart still beating, still dying.
I can’t think of a fitting way to end this epitaph, so I went to my notes app and found a quote I saved by Billy-Ray Belcourt in A History of my Brief Body (great read, by the way), “To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.”
Talk soon,
Natahna
The recommends: The books, All About Love by bell hooks and Becoming Safely Embodied by Deirdre Fay. They will put you back together if nothing else will.
What a beautiful epitaph. Feeling all the Big Feels over here ❤️