The Left Behind

A final posting on Teddy, next to this picture I took in Hyannis, 48 hours before his passing

I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about the ones left behind, sister and wife and children. I was thinking too of Ted himself missing the handsome oldest brother Joe, and those sisters,  and especially  Jack and Bobby, just  missing them all, that youngest brother, decade after lonely decade.I thought too of my own family, my grandfather Michael so young when his first wife died at 31 and still young when his second wife died at 42. He gave up on love then and turned inward toward his five children, who so adored him they could hardly bear to marry and start their own lives, knowing it meant leaving e him.In 1921 he built a summer home in the Berkshires, a place he loved above all others and saw again in hallucination hours before he died. At some point – after the first bereavement? the second? -  he put a piece of verse over the living room fireplace where it stayed for more than 40 years. I was present when our mother and aunt took it down the day we turned the place over  to new owners.This verse is by Longfellow who knew something about what it feels like to be left behind as his young wife burned to death one summer day trying to seal  locks of her children’s hair in wax . He  himself was burned so severely in his effort to smother the flames that he could not attend her funeral and ever after wore a beard to hide the facial scarring.I memorized the lines in childhood and don't they cone back to me still with the force of a blow almost, every time I think of the sad and sorrowing ones left behind. It goes like this:

Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have saidBeneath this roof at midnight, in the daysThat are no more, and shall no more return.Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;I stay a little longer, as one staysTo cover up the embers that still burn.