Triggers

For Christmas I give Jim a boxed set of vintage movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  We discovered this pair of Hollywood dancers as newlyweds at the University of Chicago.

                                                 
As part of our taking it easy in this New Year, we watch a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie each day for five days. Towards the end of the fifth movie, a young man dies suddenly. Jim breaks our stunned silence: “These are supposed to have happy endings.”
Triggers abound. Jim’s Aunt Bee, his dad’s sister, died last week. We’re in Utah for the funeral. We certainly don’t have a corner on pain and grief.
On the airplane to Utah I read a book my sister sent me: What Are We Doing on Earth? by an Australian Jesuit, Richard Leonard. A phrase pops off the page: ‘a Christian burial’. Suddenly I’m in a foggy cemetery, two soldiers standing watch over a flag-draped coffin, a bugler in the middle distance.
Further along in Leonard’s book a man writes a letter to him, describing the return to his wife and sons after a self-imposed absence. His wife dies of breast cancer shortly after his return. That’s in the second sentence. The third stops me in my tracks. “After the undertakers took her away…” Have I ever stopped crying, somewhere inside, since watching the black hearse’s brake lights as it paused at the end of our driveway, the left turn signal flashing for moments before it pulled out and disappeared into the night? I often think I have moved on, but in a second I’m back there, silently saying goodbye.