{"id":1965,"date":"2021-04-19T17:45:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T00:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=1965"},"modified":"2021-04-19T17:47:44","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T00:47:44","slug":"garrett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=1965","title":{"rendered":"Garrett Loube"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The dead don\u2019t sense the loss; that falls to the living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the dead leave is absence. The emptiness of where they once were hangs between those who remain. There are feelings, yes, and memories and stories, recalled, retold and reconfigured, but displays of emotion and arrays of narration do not fill the void; they define it further by drawing attention to what is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not one to think much about death and dying even though at my age \u2013 now into my third half-century as the calendar goes \u2013 it increasingly disrupts my focus to live day by day with a reminder that someone I know is no longer doing just that. My father, who could whistle past the graveyard with the best of them as long as he had a highball in one hand and a Camel in the other, was known to remark, usually upon the seeing the number of obituaries in the morning paper, \u201cLook at this! People are dying who never died before.\u201d Ba-dum-dump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right you were, Dad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A friend died the other day. He was younger than I am, and a better person as well. Happy, generous, and accepting. A good soul. Magnetic also. He drew others toward him. Their presence nourished him and in return he yielded a benevolent harvest. Some were like-minded, that is fearless and open to the world. Others were weaker and more susceptible to doubt, and to them he spread wide his boughs of friendship, beneath which they took shelter from their individual storms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within circles of people, there is always a hub, a center who connects the spokes and locks them in place as the wheel of life spins and spins. To borrow from Didion (who in turn borrowed from Yeats), the center did not hold and \u201canarchy is loosed upon the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What held us together is absent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am lousy at mourning, as I am at most emotional experiences, and, to give notice now to my contemporaries who are still above ground, I do not intend to get better at it. I am working on empathy and love, and these are such a chore for me that they occupy all the available shifts in the emotion factory. No tears have fallen from me for the absence of this good man, although I feel them gathering in my heart and I know this interior leakage eventually will result in a flood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I haven\u2019t absorbed it yet, said someone who loved him. I know what she meant, but absorbing death is like trying to bottle lightning. It is so sudden, so fleeting. The dying takes time, but death is not only instantaneous but also penurious, leaving behind nothing in return for what it takes. What is there to absorb? How do we sponge up a null set? How do we digest emptiness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wheel is broken. The center did not hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think I will write about death again any time soon. Maybe never. There is both so little and so much to say about it, and neither choice appeals to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goodbye, my friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The dead don\u2019t sense the loss; that falls to the living. What the dead leave is absence. The emptiness of where they once were hangs between those who remain. There are feelings, yes, and memories and stories, recalled, retold and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[793,792,790,791],"class_list":["post-1965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-death","tag-friendship","tag-leukemia","tag-multiple-myeloma"],"yoast_head":"\nGarrett Loube - Tim Porter's Second Draft<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When a good friend dies, what he leaves behind is a absence that cannot be filled.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=1965\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Garrett Loube - 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