Relics

My first senior year of college was a memorable first senior year, and my favorite of my “four years in only five” undergraduate university experience. My roommate, a close friend since our freshwoman days when we bonded over cigarettes and romantic naivety, had recently experienced heartbreak when her nearly three-year relationship came to an adulterous end. To commemorate what had been or, more accurately, what remained, she created a body outline, in masking tape, on our 5 x 8 area rug. The rug was classic dorm flooring décor with its rough texture and open invitation, by way of its dark burgundy color, for mixed drink spills. There were many an Apple Pie Shot (half apple juice, half vodka, topped with whip cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon; shoot, swish, swallow) poured both inside and outside the lines of my friend’s rug body outline. There were also many cigarette ashes layered in among its course weave. And inside the outline of Lisa en mask there was a relic, a broken heart. 

It was hers to remember. 

By October of 2001, the body outline was under the watch of an oversized, plastic, Halloween bat that hung above our television until the end of the academic year and Lisa’s graduation. I did not want to come back to my second senior year without her. She was the first one to tell me that a plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She was the one who had introduced me to a man I would marry, and later divorce. She was the one who joined me on Superbowl Sunday for a TLC special about same-sex weddings and the one who had first shown me The Crow, Brandon Lee version/the only one that matters. She was the one who would army crawl across her own body outline to look for signs of feet outside the door when we were trying to hide from everyone. She was the one to welcome me back from night class to a solo New Year’s Eve celebration, complete with Kenny G’s “Auld Lang Syne” and cheap wine, both on repeat. It was not December 31st, but she needed the year to be over. 

For a night, it was. 

Rituals, even the last-minute, mellow saxophone type, are cathartic. Honoring a life, grieving a love, or bidding farewell to a possibility asks much of our hearts. Tears and words and music and gatherings give us a means of lightening the load, if only for a little while. 

Then there’s fire. 

It is common practice for flames to consume or cleanse that which has passed, is broken, or in need of new life. In the Christian church, particularly those high on liturgy, the fronds of Palm Sunday procession are burned and their remains held until they are turned into black crosses on the foreheads of next year’s Ash Wednesday faithful. Many farmers use prescribed burns to break down dead plant matter and release the nutrients into the soil for next year’s crop. Some New Year’s Eve celebrations that stay in the December 31st box offer participants the opportunity to write down the things they do not want to bring into January and release them into the fire to smolder, and maybe find forgiveness.  

When my graduate school roommate was ready to release photos and pain from her long-ago engagement there were no formal words, just a lighter and a pot. The pictures set for cremation had moved with Traci from Mount Vernon, IN to Nashville, TN. Years before, they represented a relationship blooming into a would-be marriage, a promise of holy matrimony complete with the task of being a conservative preacher’s wife. It was a trip across the ocean, a semester spent at Harlexton College in the United Kingdom that gave Traci both the assurance and will to make sure she would never play the role she was never meant to play.  

But the pictures had stayed, as they so often do when a relationship ends. Letting go of a person or a possibility doesn’t always mean letting go of the proof that even though you were the one to walk away, you were also the one who once said, “Yes.” You were invested. You were hopeful. You were there, too. You are permitted to grieve the person you left.  

The night of the outdoor photo funeral was cold enough for breath to quickly make itself known, but not cold enough to keep Traci from her task. Her determination was also her pact and she was never one to shy away from a challenge. Early in our first semester of graduate school, when we had just begun the historical and contextual and theological exploration of the Hebrew Bible and early Christian tradition, which is no easy task for the believer or non, we found ourselves in a sports bar in Hillsboro Village. It was one Traci and I would later visit in the hopes of finding companionship then refuse to visit after the McCain/Palin banner appeared. That first weekend outing, though, was one that would seal both a friendship of three and Traci’s nickname. From that night on, she was “The Shootist,” not because she could handle a good number of shots and remain intact, but because she was strong-willed and brave and Caitlin, the Holy Spirit of the Divinity-Trinity-in-progress, knew enough about Westerns to connect John Wayne with her new friend. 

Two years later, when The Shootist sat down on the porch of the cozy duplex where she and I so often spent time talking over Camel Lights and coffee, she kept the cremation simple but thorough. One by one, she lit a captured moment on fire, dropped it into a nonstick coffin, and watched the ashes release some of the hurt, the anger, the questions of how and why she had once been so different, so willing to sacrifice her wants and needs for the sake of a partner. She didn’t talk too much, as there was little need to explain what was happening, or why. And when it was done, on her own terms and with her own hands, her relics had given themselves in celebration, mourning, and flames.  

Two women on opposite sides of an end both needed and deserved to grieve what once had been and was no more. One chose an open casket, the other an incinerator. Both were right and true to the bereaved because grief has no outline, no one path toward healing. What it does have is Kenny G and body outlines, photo ashes and silence, and time.  

Always, and in all ways, grief has time.