Bogumil Pacak-Gamalski

One year. Entire year. twelve months, three hundred sixty-six days. It is hard as hell,  no point in being poetic in choosing words.

Came to Pictou today to spend time in the cemetery where we interned your ashes. Windy, very cold, and wet. Very desolate, not a single person, or visitor there. I know, it is only a stone, a typical cemetery tablet with a name, dates, sometimes a short description.  Your name. Yours, your parents, your baby brother you never had a chance to know. And now also Fraser, your oldest brother, who was laid down here just a few months ago. The coldness, emptiness, the wind made a bit of a mess around the gravesite.  The old flowers still from the time of the funeral, wilted, blackened,  scattered around.  Cleaned it all a bit, and gathered some rocks to hold the new ones and the old ones that were good. Some still from my first visits there, when it was only a place of Leona and Doug, your parents. I haven’t come here since Fraser’s funeral. Didn’t’ want to.  I preferred going every opportunity I had to my wild beaches, in some secluded spots. Remember? We had so many long talks on these beaches. So many tears. Some laughter. I preferred these meetings and visits to visits to cold gravesites.

But I am glad I came today. It is no longer as desolate and as unkempt for the winter, for Christmas.  For Christmas? Do the dead celebrate Christmas? I know the legend and stories of cemeteries and dead folks around November 1, the Old Souls Day. But Christmas? Never thought of that. But just in case, the stuff I brought is sort of wintery-Christmassy appropriate. You know – green branches and so on.  You know that I don’t like when things like that are not taken care of. It is just the oddity how some things are done (or not done properly) on tiny local cemeteries, I suppose.  So I came and fixed what I could.

Fix things? How to ‘fix things’? Nothing can be fixed when everything is broken. Yes, I know You are not there, not under this ground. You are with me. Forever. I have engraved some words on the stone that and thought it said that You are forever in my memory.  And I smiled. In my memory? Really?  That is all that is left, that came to be of our life? Our love?  Just to remember?  How silly words could be to describe emotions, feelings…. You are just part of my soul, part of me. I don’t remember fully, who I was before I met You. I think I was just in a state of waiting. Waiting and searching for You. And I have found You. No, these words were not meant for You or to remind me. They are to the strange passerby to know that You were loved by someone. To passerby, who will not know, who you were or I was. But will know that You were loved. That’s when I noticed that I wrote them correctly on the stone: in ‘my heart’, not ‘in my memory’.

In one of my previous ‘Talks with You’ I published a poem describing how difficult it is to … describe love in words. How she escapes dictionaries and vocabularies. I will repeat the last part of the poem. Just in case You forgot it. And later, some other day we will talk again.

Even when she sleeps –

Her breathing is

expecting you.

That is why when I call you –

I scream or I cry.

And most often when I call you –

I am silent.