"Indeterminable"

You might remember that Maria, my sweet seventeen-year-old cousin, died unexpectedly and inexplicably this past June. After six long months, the autopsy report came back yesterday. Cause of death? "Indeterminable." Manner of death? "Indeterminable." While the doctors recommended that her living relatives get tested for a particular kind of hard-to-detect heart disease, that appears to be just speculation. The point is, they have no idea why this healthy girl died one afternoon. Her family is left with the reasoning that, as they put it when sharing the news, "God wanted her ... No earthly explanation was to be found."

I'm struck that this "indeterminable" news came on the same day as the awful shooting in a Connecticut elementary school, which left 28 dead, including twenty children. That's a different kind of inexplicable death that leaves the rest of us feeling pensive, and angry, and sorrowful, and searching, and profoundly empathetic.

While each story has its own scope, and there are no equivalencies, it felt like there was a curious sort of rhyme yesterday, to reconcile ourselves with the permanent uncertainty of Maria's passing at the same moment that so many others met the unique questions that came out of the violence targeting children at school. Like a chorus, each of us with our own reasons: connected and apart, mouths open, a wail, a song. The warp and weft of it all.

Before, I offered a poem for Maria Rose and said there might be more. Here is the more.

 

Making a Fist
By Naomi Shihab Nye

    We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                                  —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)
By Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Comments

[Karen M Hayter, J.D,]

Angels don't need a reason to pass on. They just fly away, waiting to greet those who follow. Maria welcomed 20 more angels on Friday.