Lost Friends

Captain Carroll LeFon USN (retired) RIP

It's not a penny found on the street

Scuffed, darkened and pocketed.

It requires penny after penny after penny

Of time and thought and laughter

Accumulated in a Mason jar in the kitchen sunshine.

I carried the jar

Toward the maple table to count moments,

To plan a shared splurge when the phone rang.

I answered

And the jar fell to the tile shattering

Into pennies rolling, clattering, circling,

Glass shards everywhere.

I scooped them into piles.

Blood dripped from my hands

To stone squares, on clear glass running red,

On piled and scattered pennies.

There's not a good way found

To lose a friend.
 

I never met him in person, yet we were friends. The first blog I followed when I started blogging, the blogger I stayed loyal to through the years. Wise words are like pennies collected on the street, as change, in drawers. In the end, we are richer for them.

Smart, a poet, a fighter pilot who loved his wife and family. I will miss him but there's joy in the words and photos and thoughts and friendships he nurtured on his blog Neptunus Lex. In the end I am richer for knowing him. We are all richer. 

January 2nd

Thirty-two years ago today I called my sister-in-law in Beaufort. We’d talked to her and my brother on Christmas Day but it was the New Year and we’d not touched base on the first. Six o-clock at night, but he was flying. Three hops that day. Kath said he’d call when he landed from the last. I remember Kath and I laughing about married life. I remember her talking about what a wonderful holiday season they’d had and Don fishing for crabs off the pier with Tim, their eight year old. She mentioned his new boat, a Boston Whaler. Andy immediately wanted to talk to him about it. I had to tell my other half to stop trying to grab the phone because Don wasn’t there to talk to.

Don would never be there to talk to again--except in my head.

Some days I feel his loss as a little ache, a tiny “oh I wish he were here” or a “things would be different if...” This week, a student at Santa Barbara contacted me. He’s working to digitize all the information to locate veterans’ graves. He wants to write a blogpost for my blog. I wrote back yes.

Then I put in my brother’s name and San Diego, California. And found his grave marker.

http://www.locategrave.org/l/358315/Jones

www.locategrave.org

A wave of grief and what ifs and loneliness and loss overwhelmed me.

He’s not there, in body or in spirit. Midair collisions at night over the water are not so kind to return an aviator for burial.

There is no timeline for grief. No right or wrong way to grieve. Hold your loved ones close when you can.

Today I am sad.

I Know Him Too Well

He’s never invited to our table, on base, in housing, with the kids.
He is not welcome to knock on my door, nor my neighbors’ doors
Nor my friends’, nor wanted on a visit to anyone I know.

Yet he sneaks in anyway
Or blows in on a scrap of paper
Or on the evening news
Or in a chance phone call
An email
And he still knocks with the fist of the uniformed
The warm hand of a rabbi, priest, pastor.

Dear God. No.

If he announces his visit ahead of time,
We fight like muddy Marines in trenches,
Like top guns on ACMs over the Mekong,
Like sailors refusing to give up the ship,
We struggle to our last breath
To prevent him overrunning our position.

He dresses in flames and blood, sometimes in mystery
Often in black as tears or red as sobs or gray as grief.

I try not to think of him.
I never remember when he ends his visit.
Even when he has come and gone, he lingers.
And his specter follows me all the days of my life.

When my guy goes out the door,
He sits with me
With the ghosts he came for, before.