Like Light and Death

The morning we went to the Verdigris River she took me out driving down Kansas country roads. The roads were white and we drove in squares and rectangles to get to the little spot on a hill overlooking the valley. We went to Miller’s Ford and I saw Osage Orange Trees for the first time, all the green Love Apples spread out for fall underneath.

Deep October light made it all golden, fall in Kansas only just beginning, the leaves only just starting to turn, the air warm but playing in the undercurrent a hopeful cool breeze.

We stood on her graveyard plot, her and I. The one she bought for her and her brother for twenty-five dollars. A place to go to so even in her dying she wouldn’t be bothering her loved ones with troubles of where to bury her. She wasn’t intending to leave any time soon, there was so much life left, but she knew where she was going. She wouldn’t lie to herself about that, deny it, be afraid of it. It was just there, lying in wait for the right day. She’d grown accustomed to the sight of it, just waiting for her, she’d been so close to death so many times I stared at her wondering what grace must have been sufficient that she was here with me now, a Kansas ranch woman who captured the Black Hills on canvas and knew Lakota by heart, who’d lost big parts of her heart to people who hadn’t been worth it, and she loved anyway.

I looked at the view from her plot in the graveyard, thinking how tame a name Cemetary was. How we’d just civilized death to the point of being able to deny it, when this was what it was, a yard of graves. A place of death. Eminent. Guaranteed. And she prepared for it. I didn’t want to think about that, having driven twelve hundred miles to hug her again.

I tucked the view of her simple little plot by the fence just right away in my mind, and I painted a picture of it on a small 3x3 canvas. It’s sitting with my painting of my prairie on my bedstand. Because you have to remember things like that, hold them close and think about them day in and day out, make peace with them.

It’s a good place, I told her. And it makes me happy to think she’ll rest there some day. It makes me long for a place so simple and clean to store death inside my heart. Death is just a stopping, an end, and why should we fear it?

We picked up Sally and drove out on the prairie. Kansas has red and rolling hills, smooth and broken only by flintstone emerging from earth. The trees are clustered and gathered, as if they are pouring over the edges of embankments into rivers, and the noonday sun makes the skies blue.

When you search for peace it’s never usually this wild, desperate, fast-paced groping in the dark. Mostly, you just walk right into it, as if it were waiting for you to get there. And it looks like a day spent at the Verdigris River, skipping rocks in shallow pools with your friends who are thirty years older than you but you’re all the same age. Its dangling your hand out the car window as you drive through the water just to see if you get splashed. It’s leaves floating in a shaft of sunlight falling through sycamore branches. Sometimes it looks like a plot of earth all your own where someday your bones will rest final and finished.

We had a picnic under an oak tree in the dry bed of the Verdigris. Sally found a deer head and she took it home, strapped outside the car to the wheel-less dolly. We drove up to the turnpike, and it overlooked the vastness of Kansas in mid-October, and I wanted it all. Its ins and outs, its secrets, its beauty, I couldn’t stuff into my heart fast enough to savor it. So I savored what I could: Sally’s voice in the back seat. Bev’s two brown hands on the steering wheel, the bluestem grasses swishing the old Toyota Sequoia, being in a place I’d never been before but knew by heart through the people I shared it with.

They showed me death again, the memorial for an old cowboy who’d died doing what he loved, made by the people who loved him. He’s still out there, in Kansas somewhere, riding his horse the way he used to. You don’t need to see the end to live a good life. And death seems to be the thing I meet with everyday.

That evening she cooked me a chicken and made a salad, and I took her picture to remember it all just that way. We took turns praying over the meals we ate together, and every time the gratefulness heaped over the rims and wanted to run down my face. Every time the heads bowed and the hands folded and we came to God, we just dropped everything right there, and we were all there. In a little apartment on the Kansas prairie in a town so little it didn’t matter to anyone except those who lived there, there was a whole lot of living and a whole lot of dying to things that didn’t matter any more.

When I left Kansas at the end of the week, I packed my car up in the dark before dawn. She packed my little cooler with hot egg and ham sandwiches and made me hot coffee in the camo thermos I bought at Dollar General because I’d forgotten to bring mine. She thought of everything and sent me off. Just like my grandma had. She waved her phone flashlight in my rearview mirror until I turned the corner and I told myself I wouldn’t cry, but I did when I was crossing the river one last time.

I stopped to take pictures of Kansas in the morning. Kansas glowed. And it’s strange, but I felt I couldn’t capture the colors right, they were different than the colors back home, light I was familiar with. It made me uncomfortable, the light there. Not in a bad way. But in the way you think about death and don’t want to think about it. It’s just there, like the light and the colors of Kansas. You can’t change it. You can only look at it and hold it and wonder about it. You can’t really capture death or light, and they seem to be such complete opposites when you think of them. They are two things you really can’t change. You can bend them and twist, elude them and pass them. But they are startling realities. There is no way to stop the sun shining or death from coming.

I don’t mean it to be morbid. I mean, maybe, death was supposed to look Kansas in October, in a light that drove you from comfort to come find what made it home for those who shared it with you, what made it peace in such a strange and unearthly way.