Trail's End

The morning you left this world, I had wanted to include you in a family email of pictures I took the evening before at a furancho. You also enjoyed traveling, and I had wanted to share my new experience with you.

I still don’t sense you are gone, rather that it is time to send another postcard to you. Each time I pass a certain Tabaco, I remember dropping in to buy a stamp for one. Soon it would come time to call, too, but you are no longer there to pick up on the other end.

The last time we spoke, you had just come in from a wonderful morning in your garden. Always apologetic for not picking up when I would call, you had adapted to modern expectations of immediate responses in ways that even I haven’t. You were ahead of your time.

I hadn’t been aware you became sick the week you did, when I was also fighting something. An ocean apart, we were closer than we had thought.

The evening you left this world, someone new came into my life in an unexpected way. I hadn’t made the connection until a friend did, and I wonder if it means something. I need it to mean something.

The need for meaning is, at times, overwhelming.

I sought closure.

Toasting with you and someone new on the Atlantic, pouring out your beer over peanuts in the sand at low tide, which were washed away at high, a seagull joined us, chilling on a rock and staring from a distance. Was it a messenger?

If so, the following day another messenger joined me along the Douro, that day in the form of a pigeon, who plopped down at a short distance from where I was sitting and reading, seemingly providing me with company. I had never seen a pigeon lay like that.

I left with a sense that something was unfinished.

Trails don’t so much end as merge with others and continue on in ways at once predictable and impossible to know. While yours seems to have ended, it continues on in ways at once unforeseen to the human mind yet felt by the human heart, going all the way back to the beginning when everything was the concept of nothing, and when the concept of nothing became everything. Infinite in both their beginnings and their ends, these trails mark the passage of our collective lives.

No one is truly independent of the other. This is merely something we think due to the limitations of our most immediate senses. The bonds we form with others were already there, out of sight. But they were already there all the same, and it is up to us how we develop them. Even if not free, there is will.

And that will is what allows us to connect and move forward, forever marked by past trails, while forging our own. I will always miss you, but you will always be alive in my mind, vibrant in memories past, along with the many others who are no longer with us.

Your trail will never end. No one’s ever does.