Farewell August Rose

Today, one day following the anniversary of Diana's death, I wonder how we cannot feel compassion for her, as she tried to do what was called upon her to do as a member of the Royal Family, whose burdens are so formidable! In The Diana Chronicles, her meticulously researched 2007 biography, Tina Brown writes that for us to even imagine what it might be like to be in the Royal Family we should think of the worst aspects of our own jobs and then just do just the parts that bore us the most…Year after year…With no possibility of retirement.Girl of 20 that she was, she could not have known what she was in for until after she marched down that aisle, Brown writes; could never have imagined ahead of time what Brown calls “the oldness, the coldness, the deadness of Royal life, its muffled misogyny, its whispering silence, its stifling social round confronting sycophantic strangers.”  She must have felt plain marooned in those vast palaces, especially after her divorce, often dining alone in her room, her much-loved children off with their father.Anyway I think about her at this time every year, in the days surrounding the anniversary of her passing, and about Mother Theresa too, who left this life just five days later:Diana with her heart’s delicate roots ripped from its seated place in that Paris tunnel.Mother Theresa, with the new revelation that at some point decades earlier her sure shining faith became infused with an all-too-human doubt.I think also of Elvis alone in the bathroom at the time of his death.And of course I think of our candle-in-the-wind Norma Jean Baker, simply Marilyn to the world, who, like Diana, was also just 36 when she died.Her morgue photo shows her with her clean young hair still wet from the shower.Maybe it’s odd that we probably all know that picture but anyone who has Internet connection can see it. Maybe it’s odd that so very many of us know and remember the details of these deaths. They are two of our deepest urges I think: to hold in memory, and to speak of what we remember. As billowing August rounds each year into its quieter sister month I light a candle to both.And now, for yourself today these two lovely montages: First regarding Diana, with Elton John’s time-of-her-death adaptation of the song he initially wrote for Marilyn - that one is here - and the second of Marilyn herself, in all her sad beauty and vulnerability.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1qIQpwFNA8&feature=related[/embed]  

A Late-in-the-Day Word about 9/11

Smoke rises from a building and we think of them. It can be any building, anywhere. A plane rises from the ground and we think of them, and pray they did not see death rushing toward them.It is so hard NOT to imagine their final moments, our minds somehow veer away from them, so heart-breaking are they to contemplate. Instead I find that my mind has hovered around another event these last few days, one that took place nearly 100 years ago, also in lower Manhattan:A fire broke out on one of the top floors of the Triangle Shirt Factory on March 25, 1911. The workers trapped there, with flames raging behind them and firefighters’ ladders far too short to reach them, leaped to the sidewalks below and met death there.There's a poem called “Shirt,” written by Robert Pinsky, that touches in part on this tragedy. He speaks of a witness in the building across the street, who watched a doomed young man help first one girl and then another step up to the windowsill, “as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity.“ Before jumping himself, he held these two girls out, away from the wall, then let them drop. “A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.”Then he held her into space, and dropped her too.Some say the only way out is through; that if we are to find ease on the other side of sorrow, it will only be by allowing ourselves to feel that sorrow wholly.In studying this other tragedy, I have been able to get at the pain I feel over its modern counterpart.Those families must have felt things very much like the families of the September victims. The next morning’s New York Times said “grief-stricken crowds gathered at the site of the factory, crying the names of their loved ones.”I looked up these names: Julia and Lizzy and Abraham, some of them were, Anna and Rosie and Jacob.Not a week after the attacks, I attended one of the strange memorial observances so common that autumn. Like most of the others, it was a wake without a casket, a funeral without an interment. At the Mass’s end, the priest bent into a microphone. “Take some flowers,” he told us all - because there was no grave on which to lay them.There will never be graves for many who met death that day. Met it at the Pentagon or in the Towers. Met it in the soft soil of Pennsylvania, where thousands of our Civil War dead met death too.I think of Walt Whitman, who during that war came to the Capitol in Washington expressly to nurse and comfort the sick and dying soldiers filling its halls. In “Leaves of Grass,” he spoke of the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Whitman could see beauty anywhere. And he knew how to befriend death, as we all must learn to do, early or late.I think of the weather we had that week, the way each day dawned so clear and brimmed with a crisp pale-amber light.There is that light to think of now.And there is that image, given us by our own modern poet.I refer to the kiss, and then the letting go.All the ones we have ever lost: they kiss us now. They ask us to let them go.