DEATH, PARTICLE PHYSICS AND OTHER IMAGININGS ON MY PATIO

The following contribution is by journalist Robert R. Schwarz (excerpted from his book-length manuscript, Tiger Behind Me, River Ahead, © 2010 ). This is the first of three parts

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On a particular  late August day, after I had put  down my tray of coffee and toast on the patio table and cranked  up its umbrella,  I looked out at my  garden  and suddenly was prompted to think of my  late wife’s death . The thought had  an intensity not felt since she had died several years ago. There was something I was impelled to explore; what it was I knew not.

Judith  and I had been married  33 years,  always aware  how much   we needed each other to remain  fully alive. Such was our love. And then she had   a fatal heart   while we were in Ajiijic , Mexico.

My backyard is my Eden. Here is peace and   beauty, and here  good thoughts come to mind.  The yard  is quite ordinary, as is my home in a suburb 20 miles northwest of Chicago; but on a summer morning when there is a gentle  breeze and sunshine making shadows from the surrounding Hawthorne trees, this yard  becomes  extraordinary for me.  The sight of my nearby  butterfly  garden,  filled with  wild flowers and milkweed  and  bordered by a rough-hewn picket fence and  an arbor covered with white and blue morning glories, always triggers a smile in my heart. Here my imagination can  soar, solve a few problems,  indulge in nostalgia.
But now, as those painful scenes  from Ajiijic   forced their way into my mind, all of nature’s charm vanished.

Judith had been giving water color instruction to an unemployed orchestra conductor  at our friend’s villa,  where we were guests. My wife was  an art teacher and an artist whose paintings and pottery for decades had  brightened modest  homes in America  and in five other countries.  I was a  newspaper editor and recently retired  leadership trainer  for an international  volunteer service  association.

I excused myself for a walk into town. It was Good Friday, and a few minutes later  I was following a crucifix-holding  procession towards the town center church . The procession halted at the church steps and everyone prayed, including myself.   When I returned an hour later I was met at our villa door by Judith’s  best friend, Diana , who, barely able to speak, said Judith had died.  There had been no  warning ; my wife  was only 60 and her diabetes had always been under control. When the initial shock left me that night, I begged for solace to relieve me from the fact that I was not holding my wife’s hand as she died—only minutes away from me.  Mercifully, that solace came before morning when I realized that, likely, at the moment of Judith’s dying I had been saying a litany of prayers for her and  for friends while looking up at Christ on that crucifix—and on Good Friday !

Focusing  on the  green tool shed in the rear of the yard , I sipped my coffee and tried  to forget all this . The shed has a lace curtain window with a flower box of blooming  impatiens under it and  lies in a shadow world made by a tall Sycamore. On occasion, the scene bewitches me into taking purposeless photographs of it.  But diversions now were useless.  Though I had lived through my grieving and was happily remarried,  Judith’s  death was begging today  for  resolution that had apparently  remained untouched by all the traditional therapy of closure.  So, there I was again, in Ajiijic,  being driven in a mud-stained ambulance down a deeply rutted  country road to the  crematorium . I knew  that Judith , who had a facet of modesty unknown to  few , has always wanted to be cremated--as soon as possible.  Her  wish had been  to die without fuss , without  pomp and circumstance; bouquets of carnations and Bach organ music would have roused her from  death no matter how celestial.  I also knew that the Mexican red tape which had been harassing me for two days would make  return of her   body to the United States emotionally   unbearable  and add to the   anguish of  her family.

The crematorium  was a large cement bunker with tall thistles around it.  I escorted Judith inside and asked the ambulance attendants and the sole crematorium attendant, a small Mexican man with several day's growth of beard, to please leave . There was  nothing to see in this dimly lit chamber but smoke-spotted  cement walls  and, of course, a long,  black oven with gas flames  popping audibly , nothing  to acknowledge that a human body was about to be returned to dust from whence it had come . It was an artistic  antithesis of every esthetic sense  Judith ever had;  yet , oddly,  I could imagine Judith  now grinning over some artistic statement here only she could sense . I recalled the times in our garage back home  when we stood by her fiery kiln while the earthenware inside it was being transformed into beautifully glazed and painted pottery.  And now , here was  another kiln for her.     
I kneeled beside Judith's sheet-covered body, espied the  oven with its  iron portal a few feet from me--and prayed.  My words I remember not.

As I now scanned my backyard  for several minutes,   absorbing  colors and  textures and shapes as Judith might have,  my mind , defensively,  went blank. I heard  the claw-scratching  of  two tag-playing  squirrels on the trunk of a nearby shagbark elm and  saw  two cardinals—one a much darker red than its mate—sweeping  down into the butterfly garden to peck at a cone flower. I felt inexplicably drawn into musings and meditations of a cosmic sort. I camped on a question:  Was not Judith that morning at the crematorium literally returned to dust?  And were not all those  molecules and atoms which had once miraculously functioned together as Judith's body now "liberated?" But liberated for what purpose, to what destination?

At first I asked with quixotic curiosity, but gradually the question incited  an  overpowering desire to become far more intimate with nature than I dared.  Maybe I could embrace nature's  invisible world as I do my visible  butterfly garden ?  My desire became clearer:  I wanted—without adulterating my Christian common sense with anything occult or ghostly—probe  the earthy  mystery  that physically  separated  Judith and me. Rebelliously,  I refused to face  the fact  that my intelligence was finite and therefore  would not allow me any closer to this intimacy.  It  was a moment  when I needed to reconcile— no matter how awkwardly— a bit of theology and science.

[ to be continued tomorrow ]
© 2010  Robert R. Schwarz
rrschwarz7@comcast.net