Special Blog Post: Upon Returning

An apology is in order. Late last week, your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums vanished without so much as a fond farewell.

I have returned now. Several projects waylayed me. The death last week of one of my remaining three brothers demanded that I travel to another state and deliver a eulogy along with expressed regret to his wife and 13-year-old son. I was about the same age when my father passed from this Earth on a late Sunday afternoon in April many years ago. My brother, like our father before us, did not care to live life using a quiet voice: his was an angry youth and a long road to good wisdom and fair peace with himself and his world. In his small way, he made that world better by rattling its common people from time to time and by offering it the grace of his remarkable intelligence all the time. It was years before I knew much at all about the remarkable life my father had lived, and I wanted to ensure that my brother's boy knew something about his father in those years when he stood tall, acted fiercely, and reached way beyond himself only to fail over and over again just so he could only once in a great while succeed.

On that late Sunday afternoon so many years ago, as my father lay in his final moments, all of his relatives stood around him. He asked that he be turned to the window so he could see the mighty pine tree that towered beside it. For me, it was time to leave that terribly crowded room: what would surely soon be one of those awful, gaping holes I felt upon someone's death would not be outside, especially if I sat near that tree where no one could see me. The town bell tolled 6:00 p.m., and the Dutchman's mortal life ended. It was not too long before I heard my mother walking by. She didn't see me; she had to go to the clearing where she could see the sun that was, as always, surrendering its fight to keep the day lit. There, she could stand for a while in the silence of the Sunday afternoon. With a cracking, quiet voice, she said his name to the sunset, and then she turned and went back into the house to join the grim ceremony of grief.

I still think about that mighty pine tree. It fell that Summer, destroyed by a lightning strike and cut down shortly thereafter. Once fallen, it was no longer—as it had been for as long as I could remember—foreshortened against the sky above. Instead, as it lay on the ground, I could see its entire length, its life from beginning to end. Scars and flaws were everywhere, but the tree was no less magnificent for them. It was so young and frail near the top: the lightning was able to wreck it unmercifully there; but at its base, it was massive, powerful, and full of such strength.

And as much as it had nurtured life and given comfort to the living and the dying in the years that it had stood, the tree offered its most as it lay in state, where it could patiently await the wind, the rain, and the fires to scatter it to the earth and sky and thereby send its legacy onward.



The Dark Wraith will resume posting tomorrow.