LOVE TAX

COUNTING LOSSES

Michigan mortician, undertaker, essayist, and poet, Thomas Lynch, says that grief is the tax we pay on loving people. If so, we are being audited.

Since June, Kendra and I have buried three grandparents. So much about this is beautiful. At least the order is tidy and our grandparents didn't have to bury us. But grandparents, differently so than parents or other beloved ones, evoke a certain kind of sadness in the hole that is left after their death. Grandparents, on the whole, are lovely and loving people; their stories are rich and reminiscent, their homes warm and welcoming, their tables always set with a soda or snack nearby. Grandparents know love and loss, and they teach the one so well that they strengthen our capacity to feel - to really feel - and to experience the other.

Lois died first. She was a very young, spry, and intentional 78. Were it not for the seizing and constricting of veins that caused stroke after stroke to ravage her brain and subsequently her body, she would still be near, straightening, shopping, worrying about the rest of us. June - the laboring of spring in its birthing of summer - found her near death and near us. And she slipped away. My mother's mother. I loved her.

Edward went next. He was quiet, reserved, an observer, though not without opinion. He held his hand close; we still don't know what cards he was holding. He died with them clutched tightly to his chest. We buried him with them. I don't know now whether we really wanted to see them, or if that's what we wanted most in the world to do. Maybe I will never know, just as he will never tell. He was 89, though he seemed old the day I met him, which was somewhere near my birthday, 1975. He was a shipbuilder. He breathed in asbestos for decades. He had acquired a cough to go with the sadness, though he carried the love of my grandmother in his cool heart for 65 years. His heart grew colder still but only because death neared. He loved as he could, and his wife and children made up any deficits. My late father's late father. I loved him.

Ed gave way last. Also 89, Ed was a dutchman, a husband of 65 years, father of five girls, grandfather to a million, great-grandfather to a million more. Conservative, gregarious, thrifty, and hospitable man who drove as badly as the worst of them and gave as well as the most generous of them. Ed Anema, self-made man who gave himself to the world, was not expected to beat his wife to the grave. But he did. My wife's mother's father. I loved him.

Love, love, love now grief, grief, grief. Taxes due of a young couple who apparently had evaded them for a long while. And the auditors came with their suits and their gurneys and their "Drive Slowly: Funeral" placards in our families' front yards. But they didn't come and go like some would expect. They hung around a while and asked to see one more receipt, one more piece of evidence that we had loved like no others and needed to pay the price.

Meg, 25, beautiful, compassionate, and kind, wrestled with depression and the darkest of darkness for most of her life. She made one final decision - pursue peace, even if to death - and a light went out just before dawn one November Tuesday. My Zoe's friend. My church's child. The subject of so many prayers. Dead in the ICU which reeked of urine and stale coffee wafting from a distant nurse's station. Dead before her mother. Dead with her hands in mine. I loved her.

Deep gratitude deserves to find a voice. So let me be the first to say: Thanks be to God for life, love, and the joys we enjoyed together in the moonlight. Thick grief cannot be muted either. So let me lament out loud, which not everyone will be honest or outlandish or careful enough to do.

I know Love. I know Death. Love and Death are all family friends. I met them at 15, when their family and mine camped under a tent in a cemetery one hot July morning, and we have visited one another frequently since. I got a job next door to their home. I sipped whiskey in their backyard on Friday nights in springtime. I dated their daughter, Grief, on and off in high school, though most of our relationship made a story that never got told. Until now. I am exhausted by Grief and by her parents who keep calling. And yet I know that they know me so well, and that I'd be less than myself without their occasional reminders and the annual Christmas card. I am who I am because of my proximity to Love, Death, and Grief in my neighborhood. But I hold out hope that Life will move in and take over the vandalized and vacant shack next to where I lay my daughter down to sleep at night. Our neighborhood could use some new faces.

Grief is the tax we pay on loving people. Don't I know it. And yet, with all its pain in a briefcase, I will welcome my auditors and ask them to come, sit beside me on my mourning bench. Let us get to know each other. Let us sip whiskey together with the family next door.