Ashes and Wine

As time passes I have always chosen to look over my shoulder.  I like to know who is still following, who is still there.  Some people blaze a trail into the future and chose to let the moments of their life they built it upon to fade into the mist.   You should never look back they say, never dwell in the past.  While we can't live in the past, forgetting is is like forgetting the foundation a building was constructed on.  Memories can be kind, beautiful or as sharp as a knife.   They can rip at our psyche like the teeth of a jagged saw yet they make us what we are.  To forget them entirely is to forget a piece of yourself.

While I may never see them again, there is something wonderfully cathartic about knowing the figure I harbor in a memory still exists.  Occasionally, lives might cross again.  The most magical of these crossings allows for apologies for the mistakes of the past and redemption through the knowledge of a moment in life once shared together.  It transitions the past into the future and joins once divided paths together again.

The most haunting part of this process occurs when the apologies cannot be made and the redemption cannot be achieved.  When the ears you long to find no longer hear and the eyes no longer find you.  These are the memories so difficult to reconcile.  Memories that seem ever present and still appear in dreams.

I have loved two people that are gone.  I don't mean in the romantic sense, I mean in a deeply emotional sense.  In the case of one the feeling never presented itself until after the loss.  In that way,  it was so much harder to realize.  Today's blog is a chance to remember them, a chance to say that even while gone, they stay with me.

When I was a student in high school there was a Vietnamese girl that had a terrible crush on me.  She was brilliant, her intelligence far surpassing my own.  She had long straight black hair that fell to her waist and a name that was alien to her own land, Maiwa Smallwood.  When you are young you never ask the questions that you wish you did.  It is because being young is a stage in life during which you are finding yourself.  However, before you successfully accomplish this task, there is no way you can ever find others.  Sometimes it happens mercifully quickly, other times, it is never escaped.  Life is lived without ever moving beyond your own needs and desires.

Maiwa had a sister named Tuyet and both were adopted as refugee children by an American family during the Vietnam War.  They must have been babies when they came because there was not a hint of Vietnam in either of them.  In school there used to be fund raising days when cards would be sent around with a candy or a flower attached.  Maiwa always sent me one.  As high school progressed the notes eventually stopped and the moments of friendship became less frequent.  Whenever we crossed paths I would always say hello yet imperceptibly to my own self centered interests she was being drawn into the deepest and darkest corners of her own mind.  One day during my senior year I found out she took her own life.  At such a young tender age I was afraid to confront the unknown causes, ask the questions I should have.  Afraid to grieve the way I needed.  By not asking the questions or trying to understand I deprived myself the answers needed to placate my mind that has tortured me to this day.  How could such an intelligent young girl live in such sadness and why didn't I realize her pain?

My education continued and during my college years I spent a year on a foreign exchange program in Vienna, Austria.  It was a unique experience that created bonding with in a way that can only happen when people are confronting an identical situation and identifying solutions simultaneously.   There year was divided into two semester programs, some students stayed only half the year while others stayed the full year.  The result was that many of the close relationships created during the first semester were wiped clean and the process began anew the second semester.  When the second semester arrived one particular student named Irene Pan became very important to me.  Irene was a tiny American Chinese girl with a short Chinese bob and a sympathetic smile.  She was tormented by a relationship with an American boy from her university that just didn't seem to be going the way she wanted.  We spent a lot of time together cooking dinner, drinking wine and just being friends.  There was something about Irene that I loved and when Vienna came to an end I kept close contact with her through letters.  She lived near Boston and we would trade missives about life and our re-integration into the academic world.  A few years after Vienna the letters stopped.  I kept writing but she never responded.  One day I was in my apartment in Alaska with my wife when a letter arrived from her sister Elsie.  I was happy to finally hear from her but confused why Elsie was writing.  Elsie explained that she wanted to write me and explain why my letters had not been returned.  Irene had been extremely depressed and had taken her  own life.  They had tried to get her help yet one night when the demons must have been beyond her control she took flight from a building ledge.  Closing my eyes I imagined her falling. I looked for her eyes and watched her hair flow in the wind.

I collapsed on the floor in tears and my wife Nikki sat by my side doing her best to comfort me.  With my breath absent from my body the pain ripped through me.  It was Maiwa but worse.  Why didn't I know, why didn't I help her?  "Irene, didn't you understand, I loved you." I asked just under my breath.  Maybe if I had told her, made her feel it more I could have prevented this.

For a few years after I sent flowers to her grave in Newton, Massachusetts.  One year I even wrote a card in Chinese to be placed alongside.  I will visit her grave before I die to touch the earth that absorbed her body. I still think about her whenever my mind wanders to places beyond my reach.  I keep her picture in a special box that I only dare look at when my fortitude is strong and my eyes are dry.

Death is the only constant in life.  Sometimes it comes sooner, sometimes later.  It is the period of the sentence that we write day by day, year by year.  It would be easy to close my eyes to the past and think only in tomorrow but to do so would be a disservice to these beautiful lives lost to life. These young women colored the pages of my mind and left their mark on my soul.  I long to understand why they left but know that I never will.  Their resolutions will remain my questions until my own body becomes part of the earth from which we were all born.