by Laura Roman.
“Fly me to the moon,
Let me play among the stars… ”
Andrea died early in the New Year. On New Year’s Eve I was with Jennifer, toasting their soon-to-be life together in Milan. “Amore mio, see you soon” he wrote at midnight.
Jennifer had waited a long time for this love. It would be too sad to go into the past that led up to it. They met by chance, passing on the street in Milan. Their eyes locked and they had to stop to speak to each other. It was all out of the blue. She was there visiting from San Francisco. She was fifteen years older than Andrea. Nothing about their meeting or union was conventional. She asked me later if I thought it was possible to recognize your “other” in such an instant, and to know with a metaphysical certainty that from that moment, your fates and lives would be inextricably intertwined, forever.
“Fill my heart with song
and let me sing forever more,
you are all I long for, all I worship
and adore . . .”
in other words,
I love you.”
They lived – they consumed life – going everywhere – doing everything – every moment was a celebration. They danced to Sinatra. They finished each other’s thoughts. She often said they were the same person.
“He’s more myself than I am. . .
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
“Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
______
Her call roused me from sleep that early Friday morning. She was in NYC. I was meant to be there with her for a weekend of museums and parties. Somehow I got held back. It was 6am Pacific when she called.
“Laura.”
“Jenny, what’s wrong?”
Pause.
“Andrea is dead. He died last night in a car accident.”
He was 27.
It was hard to know how to buttress this feeling. How could we begin to understand this unnatural disaster? How should we be celebrating Andrea? Should we be looking to the literature of love, or to the literature of sudden death?
“What is to be thought of sudden death?”
“From lightening and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death – Good Lord, deliver us.”
______
I collected Jenny from the airport that evening. She flew all day from New York back to San Francisco. I scarcely recognized her when I spotted her at the curb. She was shriveled and transformed somehow, as if something in her had just died.
I put her luggage in the car. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her. Then she collapsed into my arms.
I have never experienced such grief, and never such grief first hand. It hit me to the core. I was with Jenny all day and night, that first day and night. I knew I had to be strong for her. I could barely cope. At some point I didn’t know if the grief was Jenny’s or mine, for some part of my own past I hadn’t yet reconciled, a kind of grief from an expectation and letdown that’s happened one too many times, or some intimation of a grief to come, in some confusion of time.
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.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Jenny wrote a note to Andrea meant to be shared with friends:
“Ciao, amore mio… the greatest love of my life passed away in a motorcycle accident early Friday morning in Milan. He was full of life, love and boundless energy.”
_______
We learned about the brutal details of Andrea’s death a couple days later. He was driving on the motorway on the outskirts of Milan early Friday just after midnight, when a car hit his motorcycle from behind. On impact Andrea was thrown over the guardrail and into oncoming traffic. He was slaughtered instantly.
“For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?”
“But O the heavy change now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone,
and never must return!”
How can one fathom such youth and beauty destroyed so horrifically?
Jenny was hysterical for answers. She went to psychics. She wanted to understand the story behind the story – the why, the “what” of what really happened that night. How could he be dead at 27?
_____
The psychics told her that his spirit fled the body on impact, seeing the body so mangled and decided not to return – that he was floating in between worlds, trying to ground himself through her, why she felt so exhausted. And then there were her dreams.
“You must learn to speak the language of the dead – the language of hieroglyphs, symbols, instincts,” I told her. “He will speak to you in your dreams, through your intuitions. You must learn to listen. You need to cultivate a different form of your relationship now that he’s out of the body.”
And then there were the feathers.
A few days after Andrea’ death I kept finding them, everywhere – down feathers, feathers of a light, airy, almost ethereal bird – white feathers. Out of the blue. “Fly me to the moon.” I thought this was funny. I knew instinctively that Andrea was pulling at me to communicate with Jenny. For some reason, her door wasn’t yet open to him.
“Jenny,” I said, “I keep finding feathers, everywhere, out of the blue. I know that Andrea is trying to talk to you. . . through me! For some reason he can’t talk to you directly right now. He told me to tell you that he’s fine.”
The minute I told her, the feathers stopped – disappeared – out of the blue – as quickly as they had appeared – nevermore. Evermore.
But then there was another story behind the story.
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death”
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain”
________
Jenny stayed in Milan for a few weeks after Andrea’s death, to console his mother and his family and to help sort out the affairs. Andrea was an only child; his mother was equally devastated. Jenny slept in the bed Andrea slept in growing up, and she went through his things, years of things.
And then she found this quote he wrote, scribbled on a piece of paper, some years before:
“La vita e troppo breve per sprecare 5 minuti! per quanto ti puoi svegliare presto il destino si svegliera sempre prima di te.”
“Life is too short to waste five minutes! Even if you can wake up early, fate always wakes up before you.”
It was as if he knew he was going to die. The psychics said that it was Andrea’s destiny, written in the stars, and that a part of him had actually willed it. He had written the same quote to Jenny in an email just hours before his death. As if he knew. His family said that all of December he was agitated, restless, as if he knew something was coming, about to happen. Did he subconsciously will his own death into being?
__________
Perhaps the same force that tells us we’re going to die is the same force we join when we’re dead, that, freed from the body, we become part of the collective force of nature with the power to manipulate it. . . .we can move things around in the lives of our living for their greater good.
A close friend who lost her father suddenly this year talked of how he gives her signs in nature, a shooting star or a rainbow out of the blue, and with it, an intuitive knowing that he is speaking to her through these symbols. He visited her in a dream, tranquil and full of peace, and with that dream she could finally let go.
Knowing there is no true ending, we become part of an understanding of the eternal – the cosmic, infinite cycle where grief isn’t necessary and has no place:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And then finally, Jenny’s goodbye had to be in her own words:
Amore mio,
I guess God had bigger plans for you, my love. . . but this is not goodbye. Fly me to the moon right now so we can dance up in the sky.
I promise to shine bright for you, even bigger than a star. Since you’ll live on within my heart and watch me from afar.
Ti amo per sempre,
Jenny B