Since you’ve gone…

Since I was last here, Martin Mordecai, my husband of 54 years, father of David, Rachel and Daniel, Zoey’s Aba, brilliant writer and photographer, has died. (If you have not read his historical novel, Free, you absolutely need to.) I took leave from this blog, this website, to be with him as he made that last journey, one that took him the better part of six years. He departed last year on the 19th of February. Ten days before him, his friend and fellow photographer, Peter Ferguson, took his leave. After Martin, four family members made their exits, two young, and two old. As I type, we watch, wait and pray with the oldest remaining member of Martin’s family, but one.

I have walked the bereavement journey with four other women—one family member and three good friends. I saw photos of H_____ looking lovely today, a luncheon celebration I should have been at. I am behind on pancakes for brunch with P____, and I haven’t managed to get A________ on the phone, but I plan to try again soon. D____ just sent me a WhatsApp message from Jamaica. She completed her Realtor’s exam. So we begin to slip away from one another into some kind of other life, even as our common loss binds us for always.

I tell everyone I am a poor pupil at Widow School. I don’t know anyone who is good at it, and it is a course of tough lessons.

Martin and I shared a writing life. It is a terrible tragedy that he did not get a chance to write the many stories he still had in him. Jean D’Costa writes on his obituary page, “Martin’s novel Free stands as a mighty testimony to our strange Jamaican past. He is not only a brilliant story teller and magician of character and place, but he is the most honest and reliable creator of worlds that I have met in the last 50 years. (My italics) One trusts him, and he never fails his reader. He carefully, painstakingly, describes every wood splinter, every humble garment or distant voice in the world of our past as if he had lived there himself. And then he helps us to go there too. Working with this careful, patient, inspired mind was true joy.” Martin appreciated Jean, as he appreciated so many people. They all loved him back. He loved life. He loved his two callings, writing and photography, and he served them both with terrible care. He could make anything look like a symphony of light and dark. If he died with endless stories still in him, thank God he managed to create thousands of images, a vast collection that would fill many grand books.I hope in time to see his photographs in the Art Gallery of Ontario, in their collection of works by black photographers. Rachel and I, or, if I die before we manage it, Rachel, his most beloved dawta, will collect his stories into a book. I suspect he’d like it to be called, Jesus at the Door.

When one marries as we did in the middle of the last century, it is a wholehearted affair—you give it all of your body, every organ, your heart above all. I and my widow compañeras scramble around to find hearts to travel on with, grateful for the many kindnesses of friends and family. It’s a cruel game of “Hide and Seek” where every piece of heart you think you’ve got ahold of slips from your fingers with a memory. To breathe, to eat, to touch, to walk, to speak, to think are now for me the miracles—that they’ve always been. All my life I have known, but now, alone in all these doings, my trillions of cells affirm this divine prestidigitation. Each day, as I check the number of steps I have taken on my Fitbit, the conjuring is brighter…

So sit, and really look at one thing for five minutes, after you read this. It doesn’t matter what. Look at it till you meet it, until you hold the miracle…