Wonder who you've been in rhythm with

"Carelessness is what I miss." Jeff Tweedy is eloquent, as always, in my
headphones on the train as I make my way back to Toronto from Windsor. I postponed my trip to Portland for two days so I could go to John's funeral. I'm glad -- I have never regretted this kind of pilgrimage in memory, and have regretted not doing it once or twice.

Windsor always makes me a little wistful for what never was. The tiny houses crammed along the lake in Belle River, the worn out, inarticulate houses that seem to close in on themselves in the neighbourhoods near Walkerville -- they tug at stories never written, never yearned for, but somehow still missed. Embeddedness in a tribe set in the same community since it was established three centuries ago by the french who left their mark in the shape of the long lots, a place defined by familiarity of patterns, faces, where Bethie can yell Hey Vernsie to the one car that passes us when we're at starbucks on the quiet Saturday morning.

The funeral was both lovely tribute and a bit muted. A bit out of rhythm. John was cremated, with no viewing. And it turns out, with with my Catholic upbringing and expectations about death, it seems I need to see the body to know that I can really let go, to feel the hot welling up of loss. I kept feeling one or two degrees removed from connecting to my sense of loss. It was curious.

The mass was as warm and about John as the form can be, in the university chapel where he and S-- went to mass every Sunday. The priest at least knew him, and there were two small tributes following communion. One came from the department secretary, who fancied John her best friend. "This is not a passionate love story,"she began, "but a story of friendship, which is a kind of love." I read and hear the longing in that, my perception that she was always in love with him, yearned so much for what he had with S--. Her opening disclaimer seems heart-breakingly exposed -- and it also profoundly doesn't matter, two people participating in a relational space that means something different to each of them, each satisfied in what they're getting.

The most wrenching part was S-- who was simultaneously gracious hostess managing the occasion and hapless observer as things took on a -- for her, apparently, unanticipated -- flow. I think she envisioned people doing further tributes to John at the lunch, but she was quite delayed arriving, and we didn't eat until she got there, and then when lunch was finished, it was already 3:30 and the Windsor contingent got up to make its way home. She was stricken, obviously expecting that now things would move to a new stage. I felt... dreadful, leaving, not really spending any time with her, not even certain how I could have characterized some homage to John in a meaningful way at that point.

This funeral put some shape to how I've been experiencing time passing in a new way since I turned 40, an awareness of my life having taken shape in multi-year chunks, 5 years in this epoch, 14 years in that, whole story arcs begun, lived and finished, stowed behind me in the map of time that I'm allotted. Of course making me wonder how many chunks I get, altogether.

My friend I was staying with had an argument with her fiance last night about their wedding invite list last night, and what swam through the words was his yearning for the people who'd been part of his earlier arcs in life to be part of his today space, she seeing them only in how they relate to her and him with her and feeling them cold, disconnected, unnecessary.

I am feeling a ... profound sense of that necessity of people who've lived your past with you even if you've lost them in the today space, the way John was side-shelved with me.

This is, I think, the appeal of the life lived in the long lots along the river -- people present in your immediate world, not misplaced out of reach. Only the most minor of the plot points of my life were actually lived in those houses -- I remember coming out to one of these places to visit...someone? ... with the Bondys when I was a little girl, warm lemonade in cunning and novel little plastic bottles, a summer-lit early dinner with my dad and Janet in high school, she, like all of my friends so neurotic in front of my dad, making him impatient by feverishly tracking the calories of everything she might possibly consider eating. My dad's very present self-immersion in what was right in front of him simultaneously zen and make-do, like the vague disappointment of the actual taste of an oily, melting soft ice cream cone on a hot summer evening.

I was grateful for this chance to cycle back through some of those lives of mine through the funeral lunch. The core english dept. gang were there -- all of the guys who taught me, against whom I refracted and tested and shaped my ideas, my self. They were gentle yesterday, fragile and warm in their own aging. GM so loving in his eulogy that touched on James ("boring to the end," John had said when informed of James' last words), Whitman and the Waltons, his bearded mouth calling me dear as he bent his stooped body to hug me. A long hug with McK who is clearly struggling with some ailment beyond his long-standing diabetes, speech a little slurred, so warm.

A long conversation with TD that felt weirdly simultaneously like space with a father, a teacher, a priest, a first date, weaving over the rough nubs we'd made when he taught me. Would he remember that he told me I couldn't get a phd unless I got my tubes tied, because I could never be a professor and a mother, or I'd be a "monster"? Would he ever have known how I wept when I got a C+ on one of his exams, not living up to my fragile belief in my eloquence and insight? Yesterday we wandered over the poetry I'm reading, divorce, spirituality, parenting, love, connection, and we held each other warm. He sent me a sweet email about what a "lovely woman" I'd become later last night.

Connecting with these guys was like an unspoken thank you and apology for my youthful edges and accepted forgiveness for their sideways kind of parenting, the shaping of us in encouragement and faith and careless purveying of opinions with unexamined weight. A shared, carefully carried recognition of the heartbreaks and hopes of lives lived, the carelessness and hope that draws us together.