Love
In This Moment We Are
In this moment when Death has slipped through our door, when it wants another cup of tea, takes all the jam for its toast—all the sweetness—sucking it out of us …
How is it that we feel joy? How, when Death has moved in, has joy found so much space here? Have the walls expanded? Does the air hold more molecules? Do we?
In this moment we are birds. Like the couple in the painting we bought two weeks before we knew. A man and woman, they have human heads, the bony faces of age. But their bodies are crows in flight—synchronous, wings lifted at the same precise angle like forever dance partners. Fred and Ginger. Nureyev and Fonteyn. In their mouths, each holds a dangling worm. Their lips curve in sly smiles. As if to say, dinner. As if to say, whatever it takes to survive.
(October 2022)
In April 2022, Jack was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. During the 16 months until his death on August 25, 2023, we posted updates for friends and family on Caring Bridge. We shared the progress of Jack’s treatment … and his blossoming artistic life.
After a career as a software engineer, Jack had gotten into theater—writing plays and doing some acting. On Caring Bridge, he invited everyone to a superb reading of one of his plays by a theater company in Pennsylvania. And he shared a video of a performance he did only weeks before he began feeling ill, a stunning monologue in which he came out as non-binary.
Jack was much loved before he got ill. In illness—despite sometimes excruciating pain from his bone metastases—he remained sweet-natured, goofy, curious, and kind. As a friend said on Caring Bridge, “I marvel at the way you fearlessly live your life out in the open for all of us to see.”
In This Moment We Are began as a compilation of our Caring Bridge posts, to which I added some background. Yet I soon realized that a relationship doesn’t end when one person dies. I keep discovering new aspects of Jack, myself, and the sacred thing that was the two of us together.
