Because of a cluster of circumstances, it’s been three months since I wrote here, and the longer I’ve waited to recommence, the more crucial it seemed that I have Something Important to Say. So I’m grateful that periodically somebody mentions having read this blog or, better yet, urges me to update (thanks, Kevin!). Since my last post in early March, I’ve passed some milestones and just about finished up the school year.

Important things have happened in my life and the lives of my family. We’re through with one set of transitions and ready to take on the next. When my days are hectic, my photography definitely tapers off, or becomes repetitive, but it still sustains me as I navigate change, allowing me to document both the transformations in the landscape and the significant events in our lives.

And sometimes it helps me revisit my past, too. At the end of March, traveling back to West Virginia with my daughter, I woke up early and found myself time-traveling, thanks to the particular quality of light that makes its way through the early spring foliage into my parents’ house. It was as if I were back to being a child, waking up before school and listening to the birds, watching the light come in through the windows. When my father died last June, I felt as though the house had frozen in place and time, and on this March morning I felt drawn to making pictures of the place where I’d grown up.

It was like the sensation created by the Auden poem:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

My father was the cornerstone of the family–as Auden’s poem says, our North, South, East, and West–for years, and my mother’s life truly revolved around him. To move on has been the biggest challenge she’s faced in a challenging life. Nothing has changed significantly in their house; it’s a portrait of them as a couple, and I expect (maybe hope) it’ll stay that way. It has its own beauty. But slowly, my mother has begun to bring it back to life. With the help of my sisters and brother (I can take no credit!), she’s fixed what was broken, hung up new birdfeeders, replaced her stove, replanted a damaged garden. And in April, she traveled here to Charlottesville to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for U.Va. Hospital’s new cancer treatment center. In memory of my father, she made a gift to build a treatment room. It was the first major financial gesture she’d made on her own, and it honored my dad and the years he spent bringing her to U.Va. for medical care. Her gift will help others confront cancer with the kind of courage and spirit that my father brought to his own illness.

By making meaning out of Dad’s death, my mother brings Auden’s poem full circle. Like the poem’s mourner/narrator, she experienced much bitterness, and probably felt that “nothing now can ever come to any good,” but we know that it can, it does, and it’s our job in life to make it happen. Auden’s third verse ends “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” Of course, it’s that line that’s wrong–and it’s the love, not the person, that lasts forever. It isn’t just a cliche to say that by honoring him, we keep him alive.

As the spring has ended and the first anniversary of Dad’s death has passed, I felt a not-unexpected welling up of grief. A dear colleague died this week, which brought back that same impulse to “stop all the clocks.” I sat in my front yard on a muggy night, watching the first fireflies and thinking over the year that was ending. And I realized that despite the loss and sadness, it’s been a good year–not easy, but good, and the better for having been challenging. Ben had wonderful college options and has chosen to attend Wittenberg University in Ohio this fall; it’s a school my dad would have loved and wanted to explore. Evan tackled a leading role in the Middle School’s Shakespeare play, facing his own learning difficulties with trepidation but playing Falstaff with flair and enjoying his fat-suited body with a humor and ease that I know he absorbed from his grandfather. Lily has been able to live and work at a job that is truly helpful to others and draws on her strengths and loves; like my sisters and me, she’s pursuing a school life, which would have made my dad so happy. His nine grandchildren are carrying on his legacy of loving to learn and sharing what he knew. His exuberance, his extraordinary air of being at home wherever he went, his deep and wide-ranging curiosity about new places and people–when we emulate those, we honor him, and our love does last forever.

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