The Week Begins

Adam Rogers Gillette
born: 5/22/1984
died: 8/22/2000
remembered with love: always

Seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year.
Just one week, though, I dread,
its dates, events so entwined with my thoughts 
and beating of my heart, that nothing, no one can
pry me loose. Not that I want to be free.
I need to feel this week, breathe it in,
roll around in it until the smell is mashed into every pore, 
because it's not the stench of death that reeks this week 
and every week but the fragrance of his life, so sweet.
This week each year the loss is harder to keep at arm's length,
harder to let it rest just under the surface of my skin.
The goneness hovers, a grey, pulsating cloud building up
slowly until its weight of tears have no more room.
This week, the forecast's always different. This day. 
The last day we saw him alive. It visits annually,
taking all the air out of the room. It struts 
the way he strutted smiling into my room that day,
found me on the bed rehearsing for a silly part in a silly play,
plopped down beside me, took the book, fed me cues.
He left early for work. An errand.
If I hadn't sent him on the errand, I would've had an hour more,
maybe. He left the house and never came home again.
Worked the  job he loved, took a guy home to change,
dropped him somewhere else, started the drive home.
Almost made it. But that particular sorrow follows today's.
Today's is enough: twelve years ago,
twelve years ago exactly, when I hugged him goodbye
when I hugged him goodbye, I could have hugged him longer.
I could have heard him laugh 
one 
more 
time.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2012

Yes, it will be that kind of week. The real week, in 2000, I was surprised  to see the sun shining, or people smiling. It felt like the universe should stand still to mark Adam's passing, and maybe it did. Maybe we were just too sad to notice. One thing is certain, however: if it paused, it was only for a breath, followed by a celebration our eyes haven't been trained to see, one our ears can hear only faintly and at special times. Life does go on, and in the last two years...yep, not until then...a seed of pure and lasting joy that God promised to plant when Adam died, has finally taken root, gotten enough sun and water, and is growing, growing, growing.