i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)

I first encountered Cummings’s little love poem in John Duke’s familiar musical setting, but I thought of it today because, love poem or not, it describes something important that must be a precondition of the way I feel in the wake of learning of the deaths of two dear friends this past week.

As I’ve said many times in these pages at this time of year, Advent is the season when orthodox Christians reflect upon the last things, those things being traditionally understood to comprise heaven, hell, death, and judgement. I’m struck this year to recall a dear friend’s chance remark to me years ago that the death of a loved one “leaves a hole in your heart.”

These deaths have left holes in my heart. I’ll not say their names, and my task is not so much to sweep up my heart and put love away, as Emily Dickinson put it, but to praise them, and to learn to celebrate my good fortune in having had such friends to carry in my heart all these years. The holes in my heart left by their passing will eventually heal. The scars remaining will take their place among the many scars of the spirit I carry with me now.

Do their deaths diminish me? John Donne would have it so, no man being an island; but I dislike taking solace from abstraction. Rather I would remember their bearing, how their bodies filled the space they occupied, as I still strive to fill the space allotted to me with all the vigor I can muster.

Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; . . .

May these and the like reflections and memories remind me from time to time of my golden friends, how fine, how splendid they were when they were in the world, how their presence lit up the darkness.