Carrying My Dead – New Grange

NEW MOON
September 15, 2023

September 16, 2016

Before you died 

When you died, the light went out and I stayed there with you in the dark. Laying in the stone basin, I curled my body around your ashes. You were waiting, and I was keeping a vigil in the dark space, in the dark stone cave of my grief. No candles here to dispel the place where I knew I could find you always.

But when the first tender light slipped over the lip of the morning flooding us, you went with its ebb. You went to where all the others were gathered and I knew I would have to choose life.

And I did. But it is a life that cannot forget the old story, the one I was never told. The one your death brought alive in me.

Where the dead rattle in the night like the dried oak leaves in October, or the singing of the blue mussel shells at the tide line. There is something there in the dark recesses, among the old stones, a secret language of renewal only the dead speak.

And there is someone there too. In the deep hour of the night when I am frightened, I run my fingers over the spiraled grooves carved there into those stones older than time.

You are there and all the others too, and their stories. Still. I have marked those stones with my blood so that they will know me, know the whorl of my fingertips as I find my way back through the dark to curl around you once again. To rise and to carry your stories into the light.