Seeing Through by Ricky Ian Gordon

Author:Ricky Ian Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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A year after Jeffrey died, I was walking with Duncan Hannah down Fifth Avenue when I saw something glitter on the sidewalk as I walked past it and a voice whispered clearly in my head, “That is meant for you.” It was a clear plastic cube, a two-sided key chain. Inside, a message was inscribed over a light blue sky with a white dove flying away, in darker blue lettering: “I am with you always.”

A few weeks later, as I was walking home after performing at Joe’s Pub at 3:30 in the morning, a white dove flew out of the sky, circled my head, and fluttered its wings in my face wildly. It would not let me go into my building. If I tried to, it dashed itself against the glass of the door. I had to go out and take a walk with it.

At the grief rehab where my generous friend David Brunetti paid for me to go, where I could focus solely on grief since it was all I could focus on anyway, I was out walking one day, when two horses spotted me from far across a field, slowly walked toward me, and put their heads on my shoulders, flanking me. I feel it now, the weight, the warmth, the dampness of their wild hot breath.

In Sag Harbor, after Jeffrey’s funeral, before I had to abort the weekend because being around people was unbearable, a dog heard me weeping and followed me around all day.

In the morning of the day we were going to bury Jeffrey’s ashes, his mother called, asking if she could have one of his T-shirts. I had put them all into a huge black plastic bag to donate to Housing Works. I reached in and pulled one out. In bright yellow and blue letters, it said, “Still Here.”

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