Sacred Holes

Death leaves a sacred hole where once lived a whole relationship with both potential future and a now more cherished past Still seen and heard and smelled, tasted and felt, sensed and incensed through an echoing hole of darkly bitter loss. I would be a hypocrite and a liar if I were to condemn our sons and their cherished friends for cowardice or craziness for choosing to end their lives. When government sanctioned taking of life goes on and on and on we call this the cost of just wars or a death penalty rather than a life forfeit. Yet it is the living who repay this price. It could be more honest to call these deliberate extractions a death investment and perpetual re-investment of a culture not yet sure of how radically vulnerable compassionate life could and should become. Death investment repeated as long as politically expedient, and also personally poignant whether self or other inflicted or something in-between. I do not grieve his loss of future but my own For to grieve my own lost future, all we might have yet become together, is honest, and holy While to grieve his lost future is to dishonor his choice and his compulsion to part ways when life felt too dishonest to bear another traumatic day. To be born before or after or beside and aside one's right-felt time and nurturing place is already loss of future sent through messages past as love grows too thin and faded lust for life descends too jaded, loss of faith for hope arising futures now lost. I would not dishonor, too easily dismiss, suicidal loss of life as complete insanity as if I could claim, with full integrity, that inhumane and too-patriarchal living losses are not shy of full-grown sanity. As this day closes, this time and place in tears of loss without fanfare, without deadly sentences much less farewells, I yet lack courage of my own despair about our future of continuing death investment as measured by my own limits for tolerating inane insanity, vitriolic violence, absurd abuse of calling deliberate death investments a penalty as if any life were something reasonably erased through ultimatum fines for having had an unfortunate birth day. This death leaves a sacred hole where once lived a whole relationship of futures cast together now gently placed apart. What did he see that I have not yet felt strongly enough to choose to never see again? This question changes those left behind for the rest of our haunted days and nights. Why him, and not yet me, not yet us?