The box that holds my friend is much harder to open
than I’d imagined. Beneath the plain brown wrapper bearing the label
from the crematorium is a hard plastic canister, dark brown, sealed
with heavy packing tape.
As I struggle with it in the firelight, hot, smoky tears blurring
my sight, men come forward to help me, holding a flashlight, telling
me to take my time. Inside the box I find a plastic bag, sealed with
a metal disk. On it is stamped the number
2-9333. I slash through the plastic bag, and plunge my shaking fingers
inside. Closing my fist overall a handful of the lumpy, gritty, gray
powder, I hold it out before me.
For a moment, the words will not come.
I cannot say farewell to the man whose unfailing love had been my
life’s blood for 35 years.
I cannot say Goodbye; not “Goodbye for now, I’ll see you next week,
next year, sometime…” This is the real thing: Goodbye as in “Goodbye
my beloved friend, my mentor, my godfather, my hero, the man who gave
me shelter from the hurricanes of drunken rage that wrecked my father’s
home, the one who gave me the father milk when my own father could
not, that showed me what integrity is, that died in a hospital bed
10 months ago, oh God, oh God, I miss you so much, I never knew I depended
on you so much, needed you so much, but you’re gone now, gone, Goodbye,
Goodbye…”
But that’s exactly what I’ve come to do.
That’s exactly why the box has lain unopened all these months.
I knew that when I opened it and saw the plastic bag full of ashes,
there would be no turning back, no hiding from the empty hole in my
stomach where you had lived for most of my life.
And I knew I could not face that alone.
It had to be at this fire, in this circle, with these men around me,
to lend me their strength, to share the burden, to receive my beloved
friend, my soul mate into the tribe, to give his spirit and mine the
peace of belonging.
So I speak the words, and cast his ashes to the fire. It is done.
Later, as the sun is high and I walk the circle again, I find another
belonging that I never even suspected. It comes as my flesh can no
longer contain the fear and loneliness, and it bursts out of me in
a primal howl, the death howl, up through the ground, through my groin,
through my arched spine, out into the cloud-swept sky.
It comes when there is no molecule of breath left in my body, and
I hear the pack howling with me.
Somehow, the pack that I have feared and loathed for so long, the
pack that has sunk its teeth into my flesh on grade school playgrounds,
at summer camps, on job sites, in coat & tie meetings, in sweating,
scrabbling, fleeing dreams, has now become my protector, my lifeline,
my family.
For we are a pack, oh my brothers, make no mistake of that.
The fangs are buried deep in our blood, legacy of a thousand - thousand
years of struggle to be the biggest, fastest, most powerful, most feared,
most dominant.
What concerns me, even in the midst of my profound gratitude for this
new belonging, is that in the very moment when I truly became one of
“Us”, to the other packs out there, I became one of “Them”. And it
is on the field of Us and Them that the fangs are bared, that wounds
are dealt that fester right into the grave.
If we howl only for Us, suckle only our own, my heart tells me that
we are simply taking biggest, fastest, best to a subtler, more insidious
level.
Let us be generous with the father milk, the brother milk; that crucial,
unseen but tangible nourishment, without which boys become not men,
but simply larger vessels to be filled with the poisons of unmet needs.
Let us suckle not just our own, the ones that look and smell and think
and vote like Us. Let us suckle Them as well; our star spangled, power-stroke
diesel, Support Our Troops brothers who are dying of a thirst too deep
to name.
Let us do it very, very carefully - not in great buckets diluted with
our own pride and expectations, but drop by drop…taste by taste…slowly…gently…meeting
bared fangs with the deepest courage of our hearts, with another drop,
another taste…
Let us share this holy milk, and keep on sharing it, drop by drop,
spoon by spoon, until the pain of them becomes the pain us,
and we all howl together.
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