Last look

Now that I am long across the many bridges, sturdy and weak, I find it difficult to imagine what avoiding them and crossing them and burning them must feel like. I find it a pity because my current understanding is limited — I think it should be simple, because it has been for me. Today, sitting in my home office aka my bedroom, I had an epiphany. A mild yet strange sense of sadness overcame me as I thought of what it must be like to learn to navigate one's life without an anchor that's always been there, even if not the heaviest. I wanted to ask, again, what is it like, living being entirely ungrounded? But I wanted, more than that, to receive some real answers. This is not my tale to tell, it is someone else's, but I can think about it.

I read a haunting poem by Sharon Olds today, which I'd like to share. It's called Last Look and it's about the end of Olds' 30-year marriage:

In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
his eyes. All that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain — the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk — our milk. In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss, fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any other, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust’s affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
passenger seat in a spiral like someone
coming up out of a car gone off a
bridge into deep water. And two and
three Septembers later, and even
the September after that, that September in New York,
I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
told a friend how glad I’d been,
she said, Maybe it’s like with the families
of the dead, even the families of those
who died in the Towers — that need to see
the body, no longer inhabited
by what made them the one we loved — somehow
it helps to say good-bye to the actual,
And I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to have been able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.