An Early Morning Cafe’

At the summit of the Trade Center
107 stories into urban ether
the Windows of the World Cafe
served pate’ and poached salmon
to diners staring down
into the caverns of Manhattan,
but early in the September morning,
the sommelier and maitre d’
still asleep in their far-away flats,
only the sous-chef and banquet staff
had arrived to peel the shrimp,
trim the artichokes, and wash
the leaves of the escarole.
Simple work in silence with your mates
in an empty early morning cafe’
is a pleasure: jokes, mild complaining,
a hummed tune or two,
sneaking a cigarette in a quiet alcove,
stories of luck in last night’s poker,
when suddenly a berserk machine
decides to murder a building with fire.
Like a badly shot elephant,
the hundred and six stories holding up
your peeling knife and lettuce drier
wobbled and shook for a little while.
Smoke belched out from blown-out eye sockets
but when the flames began melting the bones,
it all tumbled down on top of itself in
a smoking gray heap, the shrimp,
the artichokes, the escarole, fifty thousand
bottles of elegant wine, joining
in a sticky red downpour:
type A, type O, Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild.
Pouilly Fuisse ’79, type AB ’49,
and you yourself unless you leapt
out one of the windows of the world
to try with your imaginary wings
to finish the flight to the city of angels.
Humans so riddled with hate they transmogrified
from men to bombs to smash the girders
under your cafe’, though they’d never met you at all,
to murder you for the glory of God
with your apron still smeared with shrimp guts.
It was always thus. Try killing an abstraction
by murdering a building from the air,
but all you kill is Bob and Edna
and Sallie and Rodrigo and Mei-Mei.
A building is only a set of artificial legs
to hold up human beings in the air,
and an airplane only a sheet of folded paper.
But 50,000 bottles of good wine
and ten gallons of fresh gulf shrimp,
and Bob and Edna and all the rest.
Now that is something real!
If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you have stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.
Heaven in an early morning cafe’.
Wherever you are.

Bill Holm Playing the Black Piano
© Milkweed Press, 2004

An honest account of life and death by Dudley Clendinen

-margaret laird

People come into each others life to share their light with us. Enjoy the perspective they provide us, bask in the light they share and know we are constantly in a dance with one another.  There is no mistake we meet the people we do. There is no mistake we cross paths with so many others. Celebrate and drink it in while it is there. It is who makes us who we are today. They will always be a part of us and never separate.

‎”The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known
defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found
their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a
sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with
compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do
not just happen.”     — Elizabeth Kubler Ross

-Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, aph. 128-129 (1955).

Loss of a friend is hard. Loss of a parent is hard. Loss of a sibling is hard. But the loss of a child is described as the most painful loss imaginable.

Having an infant of my own, I can’t even begin to weigh what that would be like.  The shifts that my life has made for my son this last year has the most profound experience I’ve had in my life. I cannot comprehend the enormity of the gaping hole it would leave in my life to lose him.

When you lose someone close to you, everything changes.

When people you care about lose someone close to them, everything changes again. The pain is stirred up like a cheap martini. You feel the hole and hold it as if it is your own…because it IS your own. It’s not so much that I can imagine what that feels like. I feel it. I feel them. I feel their pain, their loss, their grief.

Everything changes with traumatic loss. Why is that?  Trauma and loss is universal, like love, like joy. We can’t find words because there are no words to express the deep feelings, the intensity, the enormity and we don’t need to. We see it in each others eyes. We feel it.  Processing trauma and loss is a very individual process. Re-prioritizing happens in an instant. We are reminded of the Truths of life and loves and we hold on to what is truly dear to us when we are reminded what can be lost. Time is altered. We remember what matters to us.

The paradox of loss and gain. Two sides of the same coin, existing together, making the whole, in spite of the fact that you can only see one side at a time.

You HAVE  to expand and contract. You have to find meaning just to pull yourself through the day. Because without trying to find meaning you would be crushed by the enormity of it all.

Traumatic loss is like the “tablecloth pull trick”.   As in the tablecloth being pulled suddenly by the guy holding the end, your world feels suddenly pulled out from under you. Only all the dishes, glasses and silverware on the table go crashing to the ground, rather than rest back on the bare table, shattering into a million pieces for waiting for someone to clean up. Seeming as if it’s beyond the possibility to piece back together. Numbness washes over us and even our hearing seems muffled. The air hangs heavy, hearts hurt and tears flow for all that was said and unsaid. We feel the oneness.

He is ok, that little one. His journey complete for now. We are all forever changed for him being here and having to leave so soon. He has has brought people together. Healed wounds. Profoundly guided us and inspired us. Not a bad accomplishment for three short years on the planet.

Cry. Those tears are healing connections so needed to physically move our grief, our pain. Cleansing reminders that we are body/mind connections. One incredible manifestation of MIND. Not separate from it. Embrace the grief, feel it, look at it, explore it, name it, allow it, and it will move aside in time, allowing us to dance again with joy that takes a twirl on the dance floor.

Use life as an opportunity for awakening. Let the mind open beyond itself. Let the heart feel. What matters is right now, right here. Don’t go losing your today. I assure you, you won’t disappear.