Of Grief and Memory

Katharine’s father will have been dead a year this coming September. We just spent a couple of days in Panama City going through some of his things. We passed on the back beach road Coram’s restaurant, a place where he would go each morning around five thirty a.m. for coffee. He would smoke cigarettes and spin yarns with the charter boat captains. “What ya’ll catching, Joe Ed?” He knew all their names, the names of their boats, about their families, and they loved him. Everyone Rhett knew or met he treated with dignity. It was the way he was.

We passed the Panama City Yacht club (yacht is stretching it a bit) where he used to race sailboats in his younger days; just off shore of the bay, the intra-coastal waterway snaking through the salt marshes of the Gulf coast towards Apalachicola, a route he took often just to get away among the cypress, osprey and oystermen. He was always happy on the water, and with things maritime.

The house is empty now; a few books about old boats, old records and pictures in boxes of lives lived, faded by the persistent salt air. I held an old wristwatch to my ear. It wasn’t ticking. Still a faint hint of cigarette smoke in the house. Outside the bird feeders were empty and askew. I marvelled that the birds and waterfowl missed him too. Out on the dock there was still a rope coiled by his hands waiting to be cast or tied by his genius. A seagull wheeled and cawed as an indifferent wind hummed in the water sedge.

Everywhere was his presence, so called forth by memory, a grace beyond reckoning; memories no less true than if he had been standing there with us. He was there because love was there. Eternal life in the present moment engendered by a love that remembers, a love that will never die. We committed his ashes to the deep of St. Andrew Bay. May they exult there come home at last, and may his gracious presence exult with us here and now, wrought by loving memory. Let us forever remember each other, for remembering is a cardinal act of love.