Today, July 21 (the few minutes left of it here), is the one-year anniversary of my beloved Michael’s traumatically sudden death. Below are some of the posts documenting my journey through grief, loss, and healing if you’ve missed them.
The video above features “No Thought Left for Spring,” the last music composition Michael was working on. It is set to footage a dear photographer friend shot of the cemetery the day of Michael’s funeral. I shared it in his eulogy as well as Wingèd Messengers, but many likely missed it embedded in those lengthy posts, and it felt appropriate to feature that video on this day.
My mom and I visited the cemetery today, placing white John F. Kennedy roses my mom had cut from her garden on the headstones of Michael and my mom’s departed husband, who died two years before Michael.
My mom calls them Cody’s Roses because it is the rose my mom planted over the grave of her snow-white kitty, Cody, who died several months before Michael and whose grave Michael had dug.
As I shared in his eulogy, Michael had become so attached to Cody, he didn’t want me using the name “Cody” by itself as the grief was too raw when we began collaborating with Cody and Heather Hudson on Cody’s gut-wrenching reading of Lament of the Vaxx-Injured and the video of their speeches at the We Can’t Forget event less than a month before Michael’s death.
After dropping my mom off following our cemetery visit, I pulled over before heading out on the road so I could change the CD. I ejected The Fugitive soundtrack (special to both Michael and my mom because The Fugitive is one of our favorite shows, and it features the music of Bernard Hermann, our favorite film composer). I was about to insert my “Lullaby (Soft)” mix from over twenty years ago I’d recently found along with burns of other mixes I’d feared were lost (including one labeled owl > fox dated July 31, 2003, with a picture he drew of a car, signifying he’d compiled it for a road trip) when I heard the song playing on the radio: Mazzy Starr’s Fade into You.
This was a song Michael played for me often while DJ’ing mixes. It would have been the song we would have chosen as our love song if we’d each been asked to choose one independently. Hearing that play on the way back from visiting his grave felt like an unmistakable message from Michael—following on the heels of an even more dramatic gesture I’d experienced the night before that is so synchronistically astonishing, it requires its own essay.
Michael’s marker is engraved with “NO ONE IS EVER LOST,” a line from the James Trapp translation of the Tao Te Ching Michael had bought two months before his death. As I shared in The Art of Losing, I was guided to this line while struggling to find a caption that would fit within my twenty-two allotted characters for his marker.
I am grateful I sent this message to my future, now-present, self, as “NO ONE IS EVER LOST” brings me great comfort and seems to be continually reinforced with near-daily synchronicities—like another musical message I received three days ago while I was driving to pick up raw milk from a local farm. I’d gotten lost, and the extra ten minutes trying to find my way allowed me to hear the R.E.M. song The One I Love:
These lyrics pierced my soul:
“This one goes out to the one I love
This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind”
What I heard after that was the repeated words, “I am.”
Although I now know Michael Stipe is actually singing “Fire,” I’ve always thought he was saying, “I am,” and hearing that message from Michael crumbled me as I sensed he was telling me he still exists, he is still with me, and we will always exist together in the Tao.
While corresponding with CJ Hopkins this morning, I told him about the grand gesture I alluded to above, writing:
It felt like Michael sent me on this scavenger expedition/obstacle course so I would be in that place at that moment to hear that song. He was always coming up with amazingly creative ways to surprise me like that, so it would be just like him to deliver me a love letter only I would recognize just on the eve of his deathday.
For now, though, I must save the details for a later essay as I am exhausted after too-little-sleep and too-much-crying. I could not let Michael’s deathday1 pass without publishing something in his honor, though. On November 1, 2009, Michael said:
“In heaven, everyone knows their deathday. No one remembers their birthday. And everyone says it proudly.”
I will close with some lines I jotted down recently and titled “One Year Without.”
One Year Without
One year without your laughter.
One year without your smile.
One year without your jokes.
One year without your surprises.
One year without your sharings.
One year without your creations.
One year without your wisdom.
One year without your comfort.
One year without your arms around me.
One year without your goodnight and goodmorning kisses.
One year without your voice.
One year without your breath.
This hardly qualifies as a poem, and I stopped before I felt finished because I began realizing many of the lines aren’t really true because Michael is still surprising me; still making me laugh as I encounter tucked-away treasures in quotes, notes, documents, and files; still sharing and creating through all his saved links, memes, bookmarks, and other recordings; still showering me with his wisdom, my understanding and appreciation of which deepens daily; and still comforting me at the times I need it most, like his deathday.
© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC
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This afternoon, a cherished friend texted me the following note along with a link to his obituary:
“We lost Ray this morning.”
I replied:
“Tears are rolling down my cheeks. Today is the one-year anniversary of Michael’s death. They share the same deathday 😭😭😭 I only got a few hours sleep but just got up because my mom and I are planning to go to the cemetery. Thank you so much for letting me know. Ray was a ray of sunshine in this stormy world. I remember him bubbling along at his reception, taking my arm into his as he flitted from guest to guest and we talked about Michael’s art and the affinity I sensed between their aesthetics.”
“What a gift to have connected with him. I remember your talking about meeting up with him in various places around the world. I will treasure the poster of your collaboration even more than I already do (if I can ever find it in the midst of the chaos I’m still trying to tame).”
