Where Two Worlds Meet

The zucchini bread was baked by your big sister, using your recipe.

The tiny loaves were lovingly placed in 50 clear bags, along with a copy of the recipe, a package of tissues, a recent and adorable photo of you with your little dog, and a meditation by Henry Scott Holland, entitled “Death is Nothing at All”.

Holding one of those bags, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Ocean City, New Jersey with your big brother (my husband), tissues in my hand as I gaze out onto the boardwalk.  The plexiglass window is grimy from sand and ocean spray, but I welcome its murkiness, which subdues the intensely bright September sun. Summer is bravely resisting the inevitable, even as the air grows chilly and the tourists dwindle.

We watch people of all ages and sizes out there

on the boardwalk—some young and athletic, in their prime, some morbidly obese, some bent with age, some toddling, some being carried in arms or on backs, some in wheelchairs or on bicycles—everyone coming and going, going and coming.  I suddenly think, “The boardwalk is like a timeline”.  Each person on that timeline is a dot, each plank an “event” on a continuum of human experience: birth, first steps, first words, religious ceremonies, first love, proms, rituals graduations, colleges or jobs, marriages, babies, pets, sicknesses, addictions, recoveries, promotions, first homes, legacies, achievements, retirements, death; we’re just dots, pieces of sparkling confetti drifting along at varying speeds on manmade weathered planks that comprise a sweet, sticky, raucous, glitzy, soft, hard, gritty, sexy, sacred, sweaty, beautiful, painful and temporal surface called “life”.

Just beyond the boardwalk in surreal juxtaposition is the fierce and magnificent Atlantic Ocean, whose time and tide wait for no one. The Divine’s eternal backdrop seems incongruous for such a carnal stage as The Ocean City Boardwalk. The contrast is jarring for me to observe.  These two worlds meet at the horizon in a bold line that might be the hem of a colossal curtain, gently rippling.

You once played, laughed, and ate pizza on the boardwalk.  You married the love of your life on a nearby beach- and last night on that same beach, I kissed the back of my hand that held your ashes, before releasing them into the ocean air.  They felt at once both gritty and indescribably silky, like this life plus something beyond.   I want to imagine that they blurred and blended the dark hemline between heaven and earth, making it appear softer for those of us who are still onstage.    

Until Next Time xoxox

Annie