Nick, your disappearance has cost me my former delusions. Every few hours waves of panic sear inside my veins like small scalpels. I know you would agree that the only appropriate response to this dark fear is to look it straight in the eye. I would describe the calamity of your death now as a severe opportunity, Nick. Severe, sever, severance - the word is a slice. The fierce form of the Tibetan deity, Manjushri, comes immediately to my mind. Yamantaka is the destroyer of Death. He carries a giant sword in his right hand, raised and ready above his shoulder in order to sever delusion. You would love his dark face, bulging eyes, and his gaping fanged mouth. He slices through our delusion of a solid world out there, and simultaneously the solidity in ourselves. Poof. One day you are here, and then you come home as ash in a box. That’s how sharp the transformation can be.
I went to your favorite etymology site to look up the word “severe,” and a banner ad popped up across the top of the page for an intricately forged Japanese knife, with the tag: “It Cuts Like Butter.” I laughed for a long time.
I’ve decided to go all in on the Tantric system for preparing for death. Sitting in your cottage in the two year silence of Covid watching the life I had left ticking, I thought I might as well dive straight into death wielding my saber, cutting through my former delusions about what we are made of exactly. I have doubled down, becoming all of the definitions of severe: "serious, grave, strict, austere, unsparing, chaste, restrained, sharp, distressing, violent, and rare." I “master and overcome,” I “separate, wean, and pull apart,” I “go asunder.”
A few months after you died I opened the drawers under your side of our king bed in the attic. In the middle drawer were old gifts from your ex-wife that couldn’t be thrown away- a handmade valentine, a steampunk stopwatch, handkerchiefs. In the last drawer were all of your back-up office supplies - envelopes, staples, ink, tape, and stacks of yellow post-its. I picked up a small yellow square, flipped through it, smelling its chemical composition. I fell back on the floor and cried.
There was no amount of love, or misery, or bargaining on my knees with God in this attic that could have kept you here in the form I knew. I tried. But the delicate yellow post-its were here, solid as ever. How could they be here when you aren’t? The irony is still maddening. I spent fifty-eight years placing my hands on every solid surface to reassure myself of my solidity. When it all disappeared I was left keening at impermanence - truly the universe’s biggest joke.
As always, it’s the good news/bad news thing. Matter isn’t permanent in form. Nothing stays. But in that case, nothing ever goes away either. Every single particle returned and returned again. The world, empty of itself as itself, but full of the clear stuff of constant renewal. It’s partial solace for now, and the only scent of liberation I have found to track. Developing muscles to accept this much freedom is the magic trick. I hope I live long enough for a taste of it. And long enough to send our book into flight. Do you see? This is the only way to recognize you in the absence of time. The only way I have figured to be able to move forward in Time with its disasters is to give you this book of ours. This is a resurrection after all, Nick.
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