Beginnings

Well, today is a new beginning. Certainly it is a new chapter in this journal, as it will be the first time I have to talk about Pierre's death. It seems funny to say this now, but I haven't yet really written it out.

Pierre Jordan Dubov, my son of just 20 years of age, died on Wednesday, February 20, 1080, at 3:07 pm at South Austin Hospital.

I guess I must begin this journey of words with the first word I heard that let me know that this was real, no nightmare but just plain old reality, like waiting for a stoplight or having your oil changed.

"I'm sorry for your loss"

Uttered over and over, these words begin to take on that absurd quality of comic relief, like saying the words 'bubble gum' over and over till it sounds like the very gibberish that it is. Perhaps lot more than numbing, it's a reminder that words are just words. Repeated over and over, they cannot be any different. It is like asking the air to be different this day because he is dead. Or perhaps I could suggest to the sun that she not be so bright today. Maybe, the ocean just cut back on the salt a bit.

No, it not like we get to alter the universe, just be a part of it. Interestingly, the line between the comic and the tragic that divides and blurs those parts of life and the universe in which it lives line is death. Defining tragedy is something I'll not only have to revisit for myself as philosopher/poet, but also to arm myself, as it were, against the misuse of the term, for it is the false feeling that so many people have; that they can somehow share your pain because they too once lost a favorite cat or had an uncle who died in a car crash when they were eight. I saw a dog dragged to its death when I was eight and I was never the same. Grief took me that day and has never released me, but it's not the same as losing my son.

In spite of my effort to wash it off and compartmentalize it, there can be no doubt that the pain I felt that day was the re-opening of the wound that has never healed and never will, not with the death of my father, or my mother, nor my son or any one else. It is the fateful and fatal march that consumes us all. Now has come the time to reflect and find an expression of a feeling older than the mind itself, or at least the crucible in which the mind itself was formed.

Death is not just an equalizer it is an ideal. The way tells us that attachment is pain and the penalty, or, in other words, the price one pays for the pleasure of attachment is pain. Death is the release from that, and most of us are simply too damn afraid to kill ourselves.