Posted by Rachael Keri Williams on January 03, 2001 at 21:14:07 from 24.49.108.19 :
Ed always stressed the importance of a title. It's done. I've been home again for almost two weeks trying to support my Mom. Now a lot of the time I just have feelings of numbness. For months I've been telling people that Ed's slowing down and that he felt closer and closer to death, but I guess I expected more of a warning from him. More of a finish on our last conversation. We had had kind of an on-going dialogue about death and transformation. We would get interrupted everytime we started getting in on it something good. The last time we talked I shared with Ed the Pablo Neruda quote that helped me get through a rough point in my recovery from my cocaine habit. "Dadme la muerte que me falta." it means give me the death that I need. Ed made me repeat it to him a couple of times on Easter. said he liked it. I bet he did, because he got it, no hospitals, or tubes, or failing brain capacity for him, just fast and sweet in the kitchen after a good long day.
I have trouble now remembering much about the old days. What things were like when I was in high school, I have trouble remembering what it really used to be like living in this house and hanging out with Ed. He has been so different with me over the last year. We didn't have arguments so much anymore, because he and I did used to have arguements about US History especially, because Ed was a little bit old school in his thinking when it came to the history of Blacks and Indians in the United States. And he didn't understand why I read Stephen King either. He always wanted me to support everything with documentation. He often rolled his eyes at me. He questioned relentlessly, even the meaning of humor which would put a quick stop to my family's uproarious laughter.
Over the last year our talks were always of a much more personal nature. I like to think that we became more friends on our own than two people talking because they shared the same address and had my Mom in common. I got used to him being a part of my life and I shared some of myself with him. And he shared a little of his story with me as well. He supported me so much in the last year. He was always encouraging, even though he never stopped questioning my every thought, my every action. And he gave the best hugs, the best pat on the arm, the best hand squeeze.
In his appreciation of my two-year-old nephew, Ed would often comment about how similar children and old people were. That's pretty much how he'd say it before he would begin to list the similarities between himself Bhakti. Friedrich Nietzche wrote, "The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'yes.' For the game of creation . . . a sacred 'Yes' is needed." Nearing his death I think Ed spoke this "yes" many times. A yes to a new beginning. A yes to move onward. A yes to leave behind. He didn't know for sure where it would take him. A sacred yes is never guarenteed.
Several years ago when I was reading "Huckleberry Finn" Ed told me that he remembered reading it for the first time in grade school. And after class he and his friends would go outside and "play huckleberry finn" navigating rafts down the great Mississippi with the water roaring in their ears, the dirt swirling around their faces, t was the dust bowl in Texas. And he told me so much water as in a puddle up 'till that point he hadn't seen. I saw him little when he told me the story. I saw the "truth" and the imagination. I see him again rowing down the river now, with a backwards wave of his hand.
In this end, Ed, you even said "Yes" to hope, and faith, and love. Something worth achieving, you did in your lifetime. Something beautiful you recognized in the instance. What you could not do alone you did with others-- thank you for sharing some of your love of life with me.