A World Without Mary

I wish a had a more apropos picture.  

It's the wrong snapshot, it's Schrodinger's Cat, the Heisenberg Indeterminancy Principal - in short, using a moment to explain a span of time - Christ, we don't even have word for it in English - using a moment to explain a "span of time" won't work.

As Emily asks in "Our Town" - "Does anybody realize what life is while they're living it - every, every minute?"

And of course, the Stage Manager replies, "No.  Saints and poets, maybe.  They do some."

In Cherokee, which I don't speak nearly as well as a lot of my friends speak French, there is a verb tense beyond present, past, future and future perfect.  In this "eternal" tense people become verbs rather than nouns and act in all times, past, present and future.  They are always with us and there just isn't a way to say it in one word in English.

So we are all reduced to using moments to represent how important we are to each other.  All we have are snapshots (if all we speak is English) that we fan together like a Mutoscope, those old crank handled picture viewers that flipped cards to simulate movement and life.

Tonight I have to remember my dear friend Mary Flagg that way.  She passed away - physically, at least - late this afternoon.  I was on the bus home from the Orchard when my friend EH told me on the phone.

It wasn't unexpected, of course.  I had chatted about this moment with Mary's granddaughter MH, EH's wife.  Both of them are as close to "best friends" as I will ever deserve in this life.  Mary was well into her 90's and had kind of left us in the last couple of years due to age and the effects of anesthesia following hip surgery.

Snapshots:

• Mary attending a musical I had a part in
• Regularly sharing meals in the Community of Sarah and Abraham
• Having tea and discussing Church political thinking patterns
• Her hosting a dinner for my parents with full embassy silver service
• Seeing her connect so quickly and deeply with my Mother
• Sharing a whiskey at her granddaughter's annual Christmas party
• Chatting about the early days of the Children's Theatre
• sneaking a flask of good single-malt scotch into her nursing home
• sitting with her in the garden with her great grandchildren on our laps
• Sitting in the infamous Sixth Pew at St. Luke's Cathedral

...and on, and on, and on - each snapshot brightly colored - but already showing sepia at the edges.

There is a great sadness in me that there will be no more snapshots of my dear, beloved friend Mary Flagg. There will be obituaries, probably a huge service at the Cathedral with national people in attendance to honor her shattering of the glass ceiling of national board membership in the Episcopal Church.

But no more living moments.  I sit here in the deepening cold of a Winter night, running these thoughts and many, many more through the Mutoscope in my head, stitching them together, fooling my mind's eye into the artificial comfort of life's movement.

As with the passing of my Mother I can take a strong comfort from knowing that Mary is no longer a noun - she is a verb, at least in the Cherokee way of thinking.  She lives in how I live, cares in how I care.

Loves in how I love.

So she is actively with me and, just as was said (literally said) at the graveside of my Mother, our experience of her will now be different.  Not ended - just different.

I understand that.  But oh dear God, tonight how it hurts to miss her and how I wish she was still here.