Yosemite Life/Death

   

Last weekend at this time I was reluctantly leaving Yosemite.  For the past 13 years my daughter and I visit on the first weekend in June.  The visitations began to find a happy place, a get away to nature and renew place, a few months after my husband, her father, passed.  Passed.  He died.  But died is blunt, crash into a wall stopping.  We want to sugar-coat the enormity of the event, not wanting to remind ourselves of the end.  Our end.  In particular, my end.  We used to say passed away.  Everyone understood that meant died.  In a polite way, with eyes downcast, sadness contained.  Away he went.  Where, there was no hint.  He wasn't passING any longer.  No, here he comes and there he goes.  He passed away.  Somewhere.  We understood he wouldn't be back.  Recently, however, when people die, we do not note that they passed away.  Now, we say, he passed.  She passed.  They passed.  As if there is now some understanding of a cross-over from here to there.  No longer is he away, he is over the line, but somehow, in hope, in wishing, still here.  Saying he passed, we understand that he died, he is no longer living with us, but perhaps living still, in a different way.   The inference is, there is another side to the wall.  There is hope.  Passed isn't a period at the end of life's sentence.  It is a semicolon, waiting for the next clause.
     I've made my reservations for Yosemite for 2016 already.  I look forward to our return.  To cycling through the Valley, staying at historic Wawona.  To letting ideas percolate and emerge a week later as I process and remember and think and write.